Miller et al. 2012 recently provided some pretty strong evidence for a solar driver of climate. “This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said lead author Gifford Miller in January. And the dates?

LIA summer cold and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 AD, followed by a substantial intensification 1430-1455 AD.

As you can see in the graphic above (from Usoskin 2003) these dates correspond pretty much with the midpoints of the Wolf and Spörer solar minima. (Usoskin 2007 centers Wolf at 1305 with a duration of 70 years and Spörer at 1470 with a duration of 160 years.)

Yet Miller never noted this coincidence. In fact, he tried to hide it, claiming that the onset of snow and ice growth coincided with periods of especially high volcanism (debunked both by Willis and by Wired), while dismissing the solar explanation with a misleading reference to the Maunder Minimum:

Our precisely dated records demonstrate that the expansion of ice caps after Medieval times was initiated by an abrupt and persistent snowline depression late in the 13th Century, and amplified in the mid 15th Century, coincident with episodes of repeated explosive volcanism centuries before the widely cited Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715 AD [Eddy, 1976]).

This is a remarkably blatant deception, acceded to by 13 co-authors plus the reviewers and editors at Geophysical Research Letters. It takes no expertise to know about the Wolf and Spörer minima. There is no physics involved, so who do these people think they are fooling?

Nobody. They just don’t think it is their job to make the case for what they regard as “the other side.” The anti-CO2 alarmists are behaving like lawyers in an adversarial legal proceeding, hiding what hurts their own case while overstating what can be fashioned in support. In the courts an adversarial system is able to elicit a measure of truth only because there is a judge to maintain rules of evidence and a hopefully unbiased jury examining the facts. These conditions do not obtain in science. The anti-CO2 alarmists are both the peer-review jury and the judge/editors, devolving into a pre-scientific ethic where acceptance is determined by power, not reason and evidence.

The lawyerly behavior of Miller et al. lead them to embrace a particular excuse for ignoring the evidence for a powerful solar driver of climate (even evidence that they themselves uncover). They don’t “need” it. But they were not the pioneers of this anti-scientific ploy. That dishonor goes to Gavin Schmidt.

Miller’s two null hypotheses, specific and general

The specific hypothesis of Miller’s paper is a feedback mechanism by which the cooling from volcanic episodes could get amplified into longer term cooling. It is “tested” via climate model. From Miller’s University of Colorado press release:

The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and creating a self-sustaining feedback system on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided.

But the real null hypothesis of the paper, the one that expresses the authors’ motivation, as revealed by blatant cover-up of their own evidence for a solar driver of climate, is more general. It appears in the last line of their abstract, which says that in order to explain the Little Ice Age, “large changes in solar irradiance are not required.”

The timings Miller found point like a neon sign to a solar explanation but he is determinedly oblivious to that evidence. He is only interested in whether there could be some other possible explanation, and as long as that null hypothesis is not absolutely falsified, he takes that as a rationale for ignoring the alternative hypothesis and the evidence for it.

What exactly is the alternative hypothesis? According to Miller’s wording, it is that the Little Ice Age was actually caused by “large changes in solar irradiance.” But nobody thinks that there have been large changes in solar irradiance. There is broad agreement that while solar magnetic activity fluctuates dramatically, solar irradiance remains almost constant. Irradiance shifts towards the UV when solar activity is high, but the change in Total Solar Irradiance is too small to bring about much decadal or century scale variation in climate.

In contrast, there is a great deal of evidence for a solar-magnetic driver of climate (second section here). This is the real alternate hypothesis, and there is at least one well developed theory for how it could occur: Henrik Svensmark’s GCR-cloud.

As a good adversarial lawyer, Miller is unwilling to betray any hint that this alternate hypothesis is even a possibility. Like Voldemart, it is the foe that “must not be named.” Thus Miller refers to the possible solar-magnetic driver of climate indirectly and incorrectly as “large changes in solar irradiance.”

Lawyerly advocacy is not science

In his role as an advocate, Miller’s fear is fully justified. A strong solar-magnetic effect on climate would be a death knell for anti-CO2 alarmism. Any late 20th century warming that can be attributed to that era’s continued high levels of solar activity reduces by the same amount the warming that can possibly be attributed to CO2, which in tern reduces the implied sensitivity of climate to CO2. Even worse, if solar-magnetic effects actually outweigh CO2 effects (my own surmise, by a wide margin) then the present danger is cooling, not warming, thanks to our now quiescent sun.

But lawyerly advocacy is not science. To only examine the evidence for non-solar explanations is to throw away information, violating the most basic scientific rationality, yet this is what the “consensus” has been doing for many years. My review of the first draft of the next IPCC report documents how “vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5.” AR4 listed Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) as the only solar effect on climate, as did the Third Assessment Report (scroll to TSI). “The Team” simply omits what they wish to avoid.

Miller plays this game from the get go, where his opening literature review assumes that the only solar effect is TSI:

Episodes of anomalously cold summers primarily are attributed to some combination of reductions in solar irradiance, especially the LIA Maunder sunspot minimum [Eddy, 1976], explosive volcanism, and changes in the internal modes of variability in the ocean–atmosphere system [Crowley, 2000; Wanner et al., 2011]. However, the natural radiative forcings are either weak or, in the case of explosive volcanism, shortlived [Robock, 2000], thus requiring substantial internal feedback.

Robock 2000 only addresses the volcanic issue, so Miller’s only grounds for calling solar forcing a “weak” effect is his own analysis, where he only looks at TSI (using the TSI reconstruction of Schmidt et al. 2011).

That’s a phony literature review. Miller’s repeated deceptions—hiding the Wolf and Spörer minima, referring to large solar effects as “large changes in solar irradiance” when there is no such hypothesis—can only be to hide the possible role of solar magnetic activity, but this actual object of Miller’s paper goes unmentioned in what is supposed to be a survey of the most relevant science. The literature review is a place where an adversarial approach is explicitly rejected by well established scientific standards, but the alarmists are not playing by the rules.

There is nothing wrong with Miller et al. testing their hypothesis that solar activity does not play a significant role (which they do by “setting solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models”). But when they pair this non-falsification of their pet theory with blatant misdirection about their own discovered evidence for the alternative hypothesis, that is bad. It is using the “not needed” claim as an implicit justification for the omitted variable fraud that the entire consensus is engaged in.

Gavin Schmidt is a pioneer of the “not needed” excuse for ignoring possible solar magnetic effects

Some history on this particular ploy, for anyone who is interested. Miller and his co-authors are not the first to pull the “not needed” gambit. Eleven years ago Shindell, Schmidt, Mann, Rind and Waple published a paper in Science that is remarkably similar to Miller 2012. Like Miller, Schmidt and his co-authors propose a North Atlantic mechanism for amplifying cooling effects, though the mechanism itself is quite different. The spectral shift that accompanies decreased solar activity is hypothesized to alter atmospheric ozone composition in a cooling direction, setting in motion atmospheric flows (“planet waves”) that in turn are hypothesized to drive the North Atlantic Oscillation. Their null hypothesis is the same as Miller’s: that they can account for the Little Ice Age without invoking any solar effects beyond the expected variations in solar irradiance, and their test is also the same: they run a model.

If the UV shift that goes with low solar activity can explain much of the Little Ice Age, couldn’t the UV shift from high solar activity explain a similar amount of 20th century warming? No say Shindell et al. Changes in atmospheric composition from the pre-industrial to the industrial period supposedly cause the effect of the UV shift to reverse (p. 2151):

Ozone’s reversal from a positive (preindustrial) to a negative feedback supports results showing that solar forcing has been a relatively minor contributor to late 20th-century surface warming (7, 19, 31).

Thus the CO2 explanation for recent warming is not undercut, enabling claims of future catastrophic warming to go forward. Of course Schmidt’s references “showing that solar forcing has been a relatively minor contributor to late 20th-century surface warming” only look at TSI, and his “ozone reversal” is not an empirical finding but a model result. They’ve got all the doors manned.

In 2005, this 2001 paper became the centerpiece of a public exchange between Gavin Schmidt and science fiction author Jerry Pournelle. Schmidt was vigorously insisting on the scientific integrity of himself and everyone he knew:

None, not one, of the climate scientists I meet at conferences or workshops or that I correspond with fit the stereotype you paint of catastrophists making up worries to gain grant money. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever made a dramatic statement in papers, public speechs, grant applications or letters to the editor. Yet I still manage to keep my job and support a couple of graduate students. This is the same in every institution and university. … I do not go around being a doom sayer – but it is incumbent on scientists to explain to people what it is we think we understand, and what it is we don’t.

To explain the sober science that causes him to dismiss the solar-warming hypothesis, Schmidt invoked his 2001 paper with Shindell et al.. It shows that there is no “need” to bring in any suspicious “new physics” (Schmidt’s Voldmartian euphemism for the solar-magnetic hypothesis that must not be named):

I was a co-author of a paper in Science in 2001, that looked at whether climate models could replicate this pattern given the known physics of solar change. We found that two features were key, allowing the solar irradiance to vary more in the UV than in the visible (consistent with what is seen over the sunspot cycle), and allowing the ozone field to vary as a function of the UV and temperature in the stratosphere. With both of these effects, the model produced global cooling (as you would expect) but also a robust change to the circulation (a weakened NAO) that amplified the cooling in western Eurasia and over the mid-latitude continents. Obviously given the uncertainties in the forcing, the data that we were trying to match, and uncertainty in the model response, we can’t use this a proof that we got all of it right. However, in the absence of better data, there is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics to explain what was going on. This was just a first cut, and better models and more data are being brought to bear on the problem, so the conclusion may change in the future. As of now though, this is still the current state of thinking.

“New or unknown physics” is obviously a reference to to GCR-cloud, which Schmidt finds lacking as a theory. Fine, but that is no excuse for ignoring the ever growing mountain of evidence that there is some mechanism by which solar activity is having a much larger effect on climate than can be explained by changes in solar irradiance. I compile some of that evidence in the second section here. For the state of that evidence in 2001, the Third Assessment Report’s section 6.11.2.2 on “Cosmic rays and clouds” is well worth a look.

While AR4 and AR5 have progressively excised the evidence for solar activity as a powerful driver of global temperature, TAR actually began with several paragraphs of studies that found substantial correlations between solar activity and climate. Only then did it judge the proposed mechanisms that might account for these correlations to be too uncertain to include in their modeling.

That would be okay if they still took the discovered correlations into account in formulating their climate predictions, but of course they did not. This is the highly improper step that invalidates the IPCC’s entire enterprise. They are using theory (in particular, their dissatisfaction with Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory) as an excuse to ignore the evidence that supports the theory, excising its known predictive power from their predictive scheme.

Evidence is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa. The IPCC is inverting the scientific method. It is literal, definitional, anti-science, and Schmidt’s “no need” excuse is simply another justification for doing the same thing. Since there is no need to invoke a strong solar driver of climate, he is going to ignore the evidence for a strong solar driver of climate, and this is what Schmidt holds up to Pournelle as an example of his integrity: the very point where he justifies the omitted variable fraud that is being perpetrated by himself and his cohorts. If only he were capable of embarrassment.

Who is actually doing a suspicious new kind of physics?

Schmidt looks askance at GCR-cloud as “new physics,” but it isn’t new in any fundamental sense. The cloud micro-physics that Svensmark, Kirkby and others are looking at is presumed to follow established particle physics models. It is a new application of current physics. What Schmidt is really suggesting with his jaundiced eye is that we should be reluctant to extrapolate our current understanding of physical principles to illuminate the biggest scientific controversy of the day.

At the same time, he and Miller and the rest of the alarmists have introduced something that really is new and problematic. They are using model runs to test their hypotheses. They are using theory to test theory, with no empirical test needed. Here Miller describes how he “tests” his theory about ocean feedbacks (page 3 of 5):

Models are not reality, and in the above case the model is known to be wrong. Total solar effects are presumed to be “weak”? That is what the alarmists all assume but it is not what the empirical evidence says, and while they may be able to tweak their models enough to keep them from being strictly falsified by the LIA, the last decade of no significant warming has them stumped completely.

General Circulation Models are the most elaborate hypotheses ever concocted. They involve thousands of questionable steps, iterated thousands of times. To illustrate, the Shindell-Schmidt paper is good enough to provide us with a highly abridged description of the hypothetical steps that their model works through. It gives some idea of the volume and sweep of what they are theorizing (p. 2150). (If you are actually going to read this, brace yourself):

Our previous studies have demonstrated how external forcings can excite the AO/ NAO in the GISS GCM (22, 25). Briefly, the mechanism works as follows, using a shift toward the high-index AO/NAO as an example: (i) tropical and subtropical SSTs warm, leading to (ii) a warmer tropical and subtropical upper troposphere via moist convective processes. This results in (iii) an increased latitudinal temperature gradient at around 100 to 200 mbar, because these pressures are in the stratosphere at higher latitudes, and so do not feel the surface warming (26). The temperature gradient leads to (iv) enhanced lower stratospheric westerly winds, which (v) refract upward-propagating tropospheric planetary waves equatorward. This causes (vi) increased angular momentum transport to high latitudes and enhanced tropospheric westerlies, and the associated temperature and pressure changes corresponding to a high AO/NAO index. Observations support a planetary wave modulation of the AO/NAO (27, 28), and zonal wind and planetary wave propagation changes over recent decades are well reproduced in the model (22).

Reduced irradiance during the Maunder Minimum causes a shift toward the lowindex AO/NAO state via this same mechanism. During December to February, the surface in the tropics and subtropics cools by 0.4° to 0.5°C because of reduced incoming radiation and the upper stratospheric ozone increase. Cooling in the tropical and subtropical upper troposphere is even more pronounced (;0.8°C) because of cloud feedbacks, including an ;0.5% decrease in high cloud cover induced by ozone through surface effects. A similar response was seen in simulations with a finer resolution version of the GISS GCM (14). This cooling substantially reduces the latitudinal temperature gradient in the tropopause region, decreasing the zonal wind there at ;40°N. Planetary waves coming up from the surface at mid-latitudes, which are especially abundant during winter, are then deflected toward the equator less than before (equatorward Eliassen-Palm flux is reduced by 0.41 m2/s2, 12° to 35°N, 300 to 100 mbar average), instead propagating up into the stratosphere (increased vertical flux of 6.3 3 1024 m2/s2, 35° to 60°N, 100 to 5 mbar average) (29). This increases the wavedriven stratospheric residual circulation, which warms the polar lower stratosphere (up to 1°C), providing a positive feedback by further weakening the latitudinal temperature gradient. The wave propagation changes imply a reduction in northward angular momentum transport, hence a slowing down of the middle- and high-latitude westerlies and a shift toward the low AO/NAO index. Because the oceans are relatively warm during the winter owing to their large heat capacity, the diminished flow creates a cold-land/ warm-ocean surface pattern (Fig. 1).

That is a LOT of speculation. Normally it is all hidden. They just say, “we did a model run,” but this is what it actually means: ten thousand questionable steps iterated a hundred thousand times. It is fine for people to be working on these models and trying to make progress with them, but to use them to make claims about what is actually happening in the world is insane, and using them as an excuse for ignoring actual empirical evidence is worse than insane.

This really is a new kind of science, and not one that stands up to scrutiny. We are being asked to turn our world upside down on the strength of the most elaborate speculations in the history of mankind, yet Schmidt thinks it is cloud microphysics—traditional science!—that should be eschewed. All to justify the destruction of the modern world, now well underway.

The evidence that magnetic fields play a large part in climate change has been known for decades and completely overlooked by mainstream climate science.

Earth and Planetary Science Letters
Volume 38, Issue 2, 15 February 1978, Pages 313–318
Abstract
Dates of climatic episodes recorded in deep-sea cores are compared with the dates of palaeomagnetic polarity transitions during the Upper Pliocene period. The chance that the number of observed coincident dates will be a random occurrence can be as low as 3 × 10−4, and if a suitable simple probability model holds there is apparently a probability of about 0.4 that a climatic event will cause a magneticfieldreversal.

“Miller et al. 2012 recently provided some pretty strong evidence for a solar driver of climate. “This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said lead author Gifford Miller in January. And the dates?

LIA summer cold and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 AD, followed by a substantial intensification 1430-1455 AD.”

I’m sorry, but these dates are widely known with much dcumentary evidence. I have written on them myself and so have many other people.

What might be true however is that in recent years our knowledge of the past has been obscured by computer models which seem to have a blind spot with established history as a new breed of technicians have gained ascendancy over historians.

Why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not, as evidenced by ice extent? This cannot be explained by CO2 or aerosols or indeed any product of industrialization.

The most obvious cause is the rapid change underway at the earth’s north magnetic pole. The north magenetic poles is moving from Canada towards Siberia, faster than at any observed time in modern history.

Sir, I must take issue with your association of the noble profession of lawyers with the now discredited discipline of climate science. How about picking on a profession that we could both agree upon, such as used car salespersons? Or perhaps real estate agents? :)

GCR may not be the whole answer when it comes to the role of the earth’s magnetic field in affecting climate. Science has a very poor understanding of the connection between the sun’s magnetic field, the earth’s magnetic field, and the effects of the solar wind on the earth’s atmosphere.

It seems logical that large amounts of solar ionized particles energing earth’s atmosphere at the poles is likely to affect the atmosphere significantly, changing its chemistry. Ionizers are used in homes to clean the air, by changing the rate at which particles clump together. Perhaps this rate of clumping is what is missing from the cloud formation hypothesis.

Sir, I must take issue with your association of the noble profession of lawyers with the now discredited discipline of climate science. How about picking on a profession that we could both agree upon, such as used car salespersons? Or perhaps real estate agents? :)

Sir, I must take issue with your association of the noble profession of lawyers with the now discredited discipline of climate science. How about picking on a profession that we could both agree upon, such as used car salespersons? Or perhaps real estate agents? :)

Please forgive me Sir and I don’t mean to muddy the waters (or go O/T) here but 1. My best friend is a car-dealer and he truly is a completely honourable and trustworthy individual but I accept that this might be relegated to the ‘even some of my friends are Jewish etc’ category and 2. My ex-wife is a real-estate agent and on this note I would concur with your position.

“However, in the absence of better data, there is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics to explain what was going on.”

This is a common argument in modern science. If we can explain what we see with what we believe to be true, then there is no need to look further for an explanation.

The problem with this arguments is that it assumes what we believe to be true is the same as what is true. It leads to the role of the scientists not as an explorer of truth, but rather as a technician seeking to prove a point of view.

Thus, if you are funded to prove that A causes B, and you are able to show with current knowledge that A causes B, your job has been done successfully.

If instead, somewhere along the line you accidentally discovered evidence that A did not causes B, why would you publish this? You were not funded to publish contrary evidence. Indeed, you might be violating the terms of your funding in doing so, jeopardizing future funding.

Thus, it might be said that scientists that publish only one side of the argument are not acting as scientists, they are acting as employees doing the job they were hired to perform.

The “constant TSI” supporters need to explain why the 10.7 cm FLUX varies from a Sunspot minimum to maximum [ ~70 to ~280 units]. The FLUX is by definition “energy” in a radio frequency band. By thermodynamics, “all” more energetic particles lose energy, and, therefore, become less energetic particles. All energy must pass through the “FLUX window” on its way to Cosmic Noise [unless the energy was created less energetic that the FLUX frequency].

The magnetic field of the Sun is an indicator of Solar activity/energy production. The real question is the “HOW” of “small Solar variations” affecting the transfer/retention heat on the Planet. As others have stated, a possible cause is the “expansion/contraction of the Ozone layer”.

The constant “TSI” view is the same as the “Flat Earther’s view”: “All others are wrong, our faith is correct”.

Do the sales people at University of Colorado Boulder with co-authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) think they can hold off the changing climate with their models? It did work for Bernie Madoff for a period of time but then reality set in. Looking for the CO2 molecule under the moving shell while the monies flow from your pocket to the the great beyond. Funny how the names Maunder, Wolf and Spörer stick in everyone’s mind. Hard to rewrite history even though every effort is made to do so.

“Why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not, as evidenced by ice extent? This cannot be explained by CO2 or aerosols or indeed any product of industrialization?”

I have often wondered about this.

The answer may have something to do with the Norilsk nickel mine in central east Siberia, located a few hundred kms north of the Arctic circle. In the good old Soviet days it used to spew ~2.5 million tonnes per annum of SO2 into the atmosphere, now this figure is just less than 1.0 million tonnes.

Norilsk is Russia’s single largest industrial complex (there is nothing comparable in the West) and for those who have been to this fun place, like me, one of its more interesting attributes is having to live in a sulphuric acid cloud for much of the year.

I note in CRUTEM 4, much of the supposed warming in the new improved model (mostly in the high Arctic and few places elsewhere) is located east of Norilsk, so it is possible a significant amount of CRUTEM 4’s new improved figures, designed to promote alarmist temperature changes, is due to the high level of sulphur rich aerosols in northern Russia up until a few years ago.

As for the accuracy of temperature information from Arctic Russia in the cash strapped decade following communism’s collapse, I would treat these figures with a sack of salt.

Am I glad to see this sort of thing written up by someone who really knows what he is talking about. Some years ago, when the AR4 was published, I contacted Nigel Calder with a suggestion that the part of the AR4 on extraterrestrial effects should be attacked, for precisely the reasons Alec has outlined in this excellent paper. Nigel declined my suggestion. I sincerely hope that when the AR5 is produced, this attack will be successfully launched.

Actually, what is missed are the natural intrinsic oscillating oceanic/atmospheric teleconnections paired with a leaky lid punctured by the loss of heat through thermals and thunder clouds. The fact that a solar minimum happens at some point during one of the longer teleconnected instrinsic oscillating periods is likely to be, and should be our first guess, the circumstances of oscillating intrinsic and extrinsic entities.

These intrinsic entities certainly and easily contain the energy and mechanisms for rather large swings in climate, as they handedly do with short and long term weather pattern variations. Other drivers must be squeezed and massaged to find tiny variations that are then blown all out of porportion with supposed amplifications when compared to the vastly more powerful oceans and atmospheric pressure systems. Two cases are clear. The recent warming can be tied, in every scientific way, to ENSO patterns. The more recent cooling, likewise. There is no need to invoke CO2 or solar influences whatsoever to explain the noisy up, now stalled/down trend. The intrinsic conditions fully explain it.

I will wait for the day when we have oceanic and atmospheric conditions that make no sense in relation to temperature trends without such reliance on what many say are the important powerful drivers, be it CO2 or the Sun. pfffttt

“Dr Mo says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:26 am
Sir, I must take issue with your association of the noble profession of lawyers with the now discredited discipline of climate science…”

That has Got to be the best thread bomb/diverter sentence I’ve seen.

Not to take away from your inference that lawyers are shamed to be equated to the hired technician thugs masquerading as scientists (thanks ge0050!). But, to suggest lawyers as a “noble” profession? Seriously Dr. Mo, you need to get out more. ;>

Great look at the forest Alec! You’ve painted a clear picture that when the alarmists are shoving their pet personally modeled hypotheses of personally buggered bores, that they’re trying get the world lost in their trees.

Alec —
What do you recommend as a measure of solar activity over the instrumental temperature period (say back to 1850)? I’ve tried a centered 11-year moving average of sunspot numbers with not much luck explaining temperature when CO2 emissions (annual or cumulative) are included as a second exogenous variable to capture the GHG effect. Annual sunspot numbers are cleaner, but would predict big 11-year cycles in temperature that just aren’t there.

Be4 would be good, except that the available series for it seem to have only multi-century time resolution. C14 in treerings would be good and has annual precision back thousands of years, but unfortunately it is completely messed up post-1945 because of atmospheric testing of nukes. This means that it can’t be used alongside the recent big increases in CO2 emissions or post-1950s cooling and then warming.

Are there direct measures of solar magnetic state that go back more than a couple of decades?

Anybody who read the climategate emails knows that these men are advocates, not scientists. Nothing wrong with being advocates, but, they shouldn’t claim to be scientists.
I don’t blame them. It has worked out great for climate science funding, and I am sure it has helped their careers. I blame the fools who believe them.
After this current batch of alarmists fades from the scene, and, I think they are fading if for no other reasons than the public has a short attention span, there is no warming, and we are broke and need work, there will be a new batch of alarmists to take their place. And, sadly, the general public and the politicians will be influenced by them, too. Let’s just hope that the next alarm will have less malignant effects. Maybe building an asteroid defense system might not be too harmful and might satisfy the public need for drama.
I for one am not hopeful. The general public is ignorant and intellectually lazy, and therefore easily manipulated.

In contrast, there is a great deal of evidence for a solar-magnetic driver of climate
The problem is the ‘solar-magnetic’ bit. There is a great deal of evidence that there has been no long-term change in solar magnetism as measured by sunspots and the interplanetary magnetic field the last three hundred years. The cosmic ray modulation was fully present even during the Maunder and Spoerer minima. We have discussed all of that several times here at WUWT.

This was a great read and for the most part I can understand your anguish, models are not facts and sun spots have been described as correlating with climate change. Add in cosmic ray cloud feedback’s and you have a great debating stance regarding anthropogenic climate change.

I also think your comment that “the last decade of no significant warming has them stumped completely” is not entirely true. When natural forcing’s are deducted from the temperature record it is more clear that the increased CO2 is driving warming. This is shown in a graph from Foster et al. 2011 (http://ej.iop.org/images/1748-9326/6/4/044022/Full/erl408263f8_online.jpg). If you add in ocean warming and ice melt its even more clear the Earth is still warming.

Of cause if solar forcing should be given a higher value in the climate models and if cosmic rays do cause a feedback, we should be entering a cooling, lets hope your right.

It was all done using taxpayers money so they could control as bureaucrats and academics from apparently unassailable positions. IPCC was set up within the bureaucracy of the UN and the WMO for precisely that reason. Each national weather agency became the political Trojan Horse.

Increased cloudiness from more equatorward / meridional jet stream tracks is a better match to observations than the Svensmark GCR hypothesis unless it can be shown how simply adding more condensation nuclei can achieve the same outcome.

It is despicable how the Warmunistas disregard the strong correlation of high solar activity/global warming and low solar activity/global cooling, especially in light of the known UV shift that takes place and the tentative validation of the Svensmark Effect last In CERN’s CLOUD Experiment announced last August.

The Svensmark Effect works in reverse, which perfectly explains last century’s warming given that the last 70 years from 1930 to 1996 experienced the highest solar cycles in 8,000 years and probably the longest string of consecutive high solar cycles in 11,400 years! (Solanki et al Nature Oct. 2004).

SC23 was a weak solar cycle with a long tail of very low sunspot activity, and SC24 will most likely be the lowest solar cycle since the Dalton Minimum and SC25 will most likely be the lowest since the Maunder Minimum, so it’s no surprise that RSS, UAH and HadCRUT3 temp data shows global temps flat or falling since 1998. Again, more evidence of the Svensmark Effect.

The Umbral Magnetic Field is falling like a stone (currently just below 2000 gauss) and will fall below 1500 gauss around 2020 or so. When it falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will disappear entirely….

Given these realities, it would seem essential for climatologist to reconsider their position on the Svensmark Effect, because if they are wrong in their assumptions, $TRILLIONS could be wasted in CO2 initiatives, and food preparations need to be taken now, because some of the worst famines in human history took place during the Wolf and Maunder Minima.

Hu McCulloch says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:00 amAre there direct measures of solar magnetic state that go back more than a couple of decades?
The ‘direct’ bit is sort of a weasel word. Is measuring temperature with a thermometer a ‘direct’ measurement? No, it isn’t. The direct measurement is that of the length of a thin string of Mercury. But we can calibrate that length in terms of temperature and thus obtain a measurement of temperature.
Now, apart from this, we have measured the magnetic field on the sun using the Zeeman effect ever since 1908. Would you call that ‘direct’? I would.

The solar magnetic field extends far into the solar system and envelops the Earth, where it causes disturbances in the magnetic field of the Earth which we have measured ‘directly’ since the 1830s

What do you recommend as a measure of solar activity over the instrumental temperature period (say back to 1850)?
So, we have a good measure of the sun’s magnetic activity over that period, see e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf

ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:26 amWhy is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not […]
The most obvious cause is the rapid change underway at the earth’s north magnetic pole. The north magnetic poles is moving from Canada towards Siberia, faster than at any observed time in modern history.
The southern magnetic pole moves too:http://www.mrinbetween.com/S_magpl.PDFhttp://www.mrinbetween.com/N_magpl.PDF

The author was not attacking the legal profession but pointing out the difference in acceptable conduct between pleading a case in court and reporting scientific research. Hiding facts to make a point is never ethical no matter the profession and is compounded when it is tied to a political agenda.

A Playboy magazine cartoon came to mind reading the article. Columbus and fellow explorers walking ashore in the Americas sees a Viking helmet with horns in the sand and says, quick hide it and don’t say anything. The cartoon was successful because it was funny and did what a cartoon was intended to do entertain. And for America the success of the Columbus is that the word got around in writing the location of the American continent without leaving out critical information.

Is science or any other profession different from a successful cartoon, doing what it is intended to do?

Samurai says:
April 29, 2012 at 8:23 amThe Umbral Magnetic Field is falling like a stone (currently just below 2000 gauss) and will fall below 1500 gauss around 2020 or so. When it falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will disappear entirely….
But their magnetic field [sitting just below 1500G] will not. We know it didn’t during the Maunder Minimum because there was a vigorous solar cycle modulation of cosmic rays back then.

Alec,
You said…
“In the courts an adversarial system is able to elicit a measure of truth only because there is a judge to maintain rules of evidence and a hopefully unbiased jury examining the facts. These conditions do not obtain in science.”

Rather it is specifically the power to cross examine and force the opposition to answer questions that gets to the truth. This is an important distinction and must be understood to properly express your point about science.
Thank you for this important paper.

It is obvious why the Miller et al paper is needed for the “cause”. If aerosols produced by volcanos
can cause significant cooling then so will those produced by industry. Aerosols can be made to account for the cooling seen in the 1960’s and 1970′ in the temperature records. This in turn will allow the GCMs to be tuned in such a way as to eliminate the need for a Solar driver and promote CO2 to (false) prominence.

Actually English barristers are supposed NEVER to hide facts or laws adverse
to the case of their client*. That is because they are Officers of the Court.
The THEORY of “lawerly advocacy” is an ethical one. Just as is the THEORY of
“scientific method”. PRACTISE may be different, of course, in both fields.

* That is why a barrister will never ask you whether you did whatever you are
accused of. If you say “Oo, Yes!” he will be precluded from saying to the Court
“My client says he did not do it”.

What the Hell! Alien space rays or cosmic rays, they’re all the same and just feed them all into the Great God computer so you won’t fry in Hell if you don’t fry on Gaia. Except that Lovelock among them has had an epiphany and decided he’s not going to face St Peter at the Pearly Gates with his laptop tucked under his arm. Strictly a Tablet man Pete… honest!

“Something that has made me reconsider the feedback’s from cosmic rays is shown in this graph from Musch ler et al.”

We have a lot to learn about the Svensmark effect. I suspect the effect is really more about absolute humidity and the water column than it is about clouds per se. As such cooling may depend on the geographic distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere as affected by cosmic rays. I’d look for more pronounced cooling over inland areas which are isolated from sources of evaporation, and possible expansion of desert areas. Over oceans the effect might be less noticeable, although Usoskin did document some effect.

The CAGW-promoting side has been cunning enough to make a multi-pronged effort, not only (1) revisionism of past temperatures as in the hockey stick, Hansen “adjustments,” etc. but also (2) revisionism of solar history.

That is how they are able to deny solar-temperature correlation over prior centuries: using revisionist data.

Even most skeptics and some commenters here (if being generous in interpreting as not undercover moles) do not understand or realize that yet. They’ve heard of #1 but naively still implicitly assume honesty from everyone on #2. The trick is to watch for giant contradictions of earlier studies when systematically always in a CAGW-convenient direction (not a random distribution of accidental errors and error correction in both directions).

An example of how the above occurs and matters is this (aside from a typo when I wrote 1997 instead of 1994):

Data from the pre-Mann era, less political (and skeptics less purged from “mainstream” funded research yet then), is less likely to be intentionally skewed, and that data is what most shows substantial solar-temperature correlation over the bulk of century after century (not 100.0% when on top of other factors including ocean and weather fluctuations on the smallest scales like a few years at a time but very apparent overall in such as the prior linked graph).

I have been working for some time trying to match up solar effects to the global temperature using recorded data from different sources on the Internet using a software I made.
I find clear evidence that the solar impact on Earth’s weather is important and it is not caused by tiny changes on the TSI signal. TSI is irrelevant.
I say weather because so far I have matched it up against the derivate of the global temperature.
From this I have made an estimation of the impact from different solar drivers plus from variations on Earth’s rotation, setting this all to 100%.
The four most important factors are Solar wind speed 48%, Variation in Earth’s rotation 21%, F10.7 radio flux, which I assume is a good proxy for UV radiation from the Solar Corona 15.5% and the Kp Magnetic Index 11.2%.

I find the impact from cosmic ray based on data from Oulu neutron counter to be small and within the margins of error. Therefore I find the GCR theory less credible.
So if the climate modelers want to get credible result they must start to include solar data. But maybe they don’t want to get results near to the truth.

Fine article, but no need to bash lawyers to disprove AGW. Even lawyers are obligated to inform the judge of known facts and law that are contrary to their case. AGW scientists apparently have not yet developed their own canon of ethics, or at least not one that we lawyers and you scientists would recognize as such.

Science by grant – dream up a particularly alarming theory. Seek out any and all evidence supporting the theory. if little or none exists create a computer model that supports it. Bury any data or evidence contrary to the theory (it’s “not needed”). Involve the LSM from the beginning to stir up public sentiment to “do something!” Use constant ad hom attacks on any nay sayers. See Saul Alinsky for additional help.

I’m no scientists by any stretch of the imagination BUT I’m well schooled by the many articles and comments here at WUWT. And the many give and takes on any particular subject present here. It seems to me after years of WUWT articles and questions raised here – the more questions and articles presented the less we actually know about how this planet works. Now we’ve began peering into the universe and our place within and as we expand our knowledge even more questions are raised requiring even more from mankind’s combined science to even begin to answer any of the question raised. I’m at the position NOW climate “science” can only function going forward with entire teams of all scientists from all disciplines across the board – no longer is it acceptable to look at any give area or subject in isolation to all other disciplines.

Michael Whittemore refers to the Laschamp event as a contra-indication to the GCR-cloud theory. At that time, about 40,000 yrs ago, the planet’s magnetic field was very weak, allowing lots of GCR to reach the surface, which shows up in the 10be isotope record, yet there was no dramatic cooling as Svensmark’s early work suggested there should be:

But Svensmark solved that riddle. The planet’s magnetic field only deflects the weakest cosmic rays while the one’s that ionize the atmosphere are the strongest cosmic rays. The 10be record measures both so when the record jumps due to a weak planetary magnetic field 10be ceases to be a predictor of climate.

This is discussed in The Chilling Stars, where Calder recounts Svensmark’s investigation of the matter (p.5):

He found that almost all the muons reaching the lowest 2000 meters of the air are products of incoming particles too energetic to be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetism.”

Svensmark’s theory has nothing to do with our sun or it’s magnetic field. He talks about cosmic radiation from supernova. Not at all the same as the magnetic field of our sun. Yet several times in this article it’s suggested that this can explain how the Sun affects the climate when that is clearly not the case. I hope you correct this as it completely misrepresents Svensmark’s work.

“The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in…..”

Gosh! These models must have been programmed with super-ultra-extraordinary intelligence to have produced such a complex result. Wait, I’ve got it, they found Data. You know, Data> from Star Trek? It’s thier secret weapon. All they have to do is ask and Data will twitch his head to the side and Data will have the answer.

Thanks for those two charts; I knew that the magnetic poles are not dead-centre on the geographic poles and that they do move, but had now idea how far away they were and how quickly they could move.

I haven’t a pony in this race, but to my unschooled eye it looks as if the North magnetic pole is speeding up, while the South is slowing down. I understand too that the North is warming and the South cooling. Is there a graph that shows corelations between temperatures at the two poles and rates of speed? Thanks.

There is a great deal of evidence that there has been no long-term change in solar magnetism as measured by sunspots and the interplanetary magnetic field the last three hundred years. The cosmic ray modulation was fully present even during the Maunder and Spoerer minima. We have discussed all of that several times here at WUWT.

The argument for the temperature rise since the Little Ice Age having been caused by solar activity does not require that late 20th century solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels as Usoskin et al. claim. It only depends on solar activity having been “high,” which does not seem to be in dispute, even by Leif.

The idea that late 20th century warming could only be solar driven if solar activity had continued to rise ever higher is a misinterpretation of the fact that correlation studies show a rapid response of global temperature to changes in solar activity, about 10 years. But a rapid response time does not imply that climate will not respond over longer time periods to longer term changes in solar activity. Just the opposite: rapid responses to short term fluctuations imply that there will also be longer term responses to longer term fluctuations, just as the warming of the day by the sun implies that there will also be seasonal warming in response to seasonal changes in insolation.

Thus three hundred years of high solar activity after the LIA (interrupted by the Dalton Minimum and the turn of the 19th century lull) could easily have explained the 300 years of warming until the end of the 20th century. Leif’s criticism of post 1946 sunspot numbers may well be correct, but it only cuts against the solar-warming hypothesis if one thinks that diurnal warming militates against seasonal warming.

John: “Svensmark’s theory has nothing to do with our sun or it’s magnetic field. He talks about cosmic radiation from supernova. Not at all the same as the magnetic field of our sun.”

John, the cosmic radiation may come from supernova, but it is the fluctuation of the magnetic field of our sun that deflects the majority of that radiation around our solar system. So there are 2 ways to modulate the amount of cosmic radiation that reaches the earth. The first is by modulating the magnetic field that deflects the cosmic radiation, the second is by having the density of the cosmic radiation vary as our solar system revolves around our galaxy and moves through areas of higher and lower cosmic radiation. The correlations between both types of modulation and the temperature on earth is very good.

Funny. There is no “other side” in science. It is all science. If there is “another side”, it isn’t science-it is blatant distortion, hiding or skewing facts, or running away from the truth in support of some political, non-scientific ideology or agenda.

The GRL should be disenfranchised for their blatant disregard to the scientific method.

“Leif’s criticism of post 1946 sunspot numbers may well be correct, but it only cuts against the solar-warming hypothesis if one thinks that diurnal warming militates against seasonal warming.”

Take the analogy of a pot of water sitting on a stove. Let’s say that at first you turn the heat up to max and the water warms quickly. When the water reaches 75C you turn the heat to one half max. The water doesn’t begin to cool from that point, it continues to warm, only at a slower rate.

But that is not the only element that comes into play. After 1976 we went into a phase where the upward momentum was supplemented by an El Nino dominated period lasting up to 1998. When that period ended, so did the increased warming.

I made the same points for Gavin a couple of years ago after he pointed out the lack of rise in solar cycles in the second half of the 20th century. He had no answer.

fujirider says:
April 29, 2012 at 10:49 am
Fine article, but no need to bash lawyers to disprove AGW. Even lawyers are obligated to inform the judge of known facts and law that are contrary to their case. AGW scientists apparently have not yet developed their own canon of ethics, or at least not one that we lawyers and you scientists would recognize as such.
>>>>>>>>>

And, like scientists promoting AGW, they frequently don’t. Then when they get caught, they hire lawyers to go to court on their behalf and come up with the most insane of arguments to keep the facts from being disclosed. You know, the ones you just claimed you have an obligation to disclose?

Think Michael Mann and his emails.
Ford and the Pinto exploding gas tanks.
Cigaratte mfrs and “priviledged” science because it was done for them by the law firms instead of themselves.

Gimme a break. The legal profession is the formal application of avoidance, obfuscation, suppression of evidence, and misdirection. It goes hand in hand with the “science” of CAGW.

Its a fairly standard part of critical review , the procedure peer review should follow , to consider what may have been left out and why . But like so many areas , such as the selection of statistical techniques for their ability to produce the ‘right results ‘, climate science appears to be ‘special’

A couple of comments find my “anti-CO2 alarmists” label confusing. I have been thinking of this as an ideal way to refer to the anti-CO2 folks who are alarmist about it. It is much simpler than, for instance, “believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming,” but it does rely on the interpretation of they hyphen.

What would be the proper placement if one wanted to refer to the opposite camp, the people who are anti the CO2-alarmists? Maybe it is not as clear as I thought. Are many people having trouble with this usage, or just a few?

To all accidentally reading wikipedia blockwarts; inhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum
you have already worked in the Shakun volcano conjecture but you missed the other minima. You still have to explain them away as well.

Richard B Woods;
In addition to ice extent, ice thickness needs to be considered. There is thinning in the Antarctic as well as the Arctic.
>>>>>>>>

Some places yes some places no. But extent trumps thickness anyway. For ice to form on salt water, all the water below the surface right to the bottom must first cool to the freezing point. A thin layer of ice represents a gigantic amount of water cooling.

First, Gifford Miller et al. To ascribe the onset of Little Ice Age to volcanic cooling from four unidentified volcanoes within a fifty year period is abject nonsense. Within a sixty year period we too experienced four volcanic eruptions, namely Cerro Azul, Gunung Agung, El Chichon, and Mount Pinatubo while global temperature just kept on going up. Volcanic cooling simply does not exist as I have proved in my book “What Warming?” Read pages 17 to 21, and if you don’t have it, get it from Amazon. You will learn many marvelous things about climate you did not know. Whenever a volcano is said to have produced cooling it is not volcanic cooling but misidentification of a La Nina cooling because the eruptions occurred by chance at the time when that La Nina cooling had just started. When an erupttion occurs when a La Nina cooling has just bottomed out and an El Nino is beginning to build up that poor volcano is left without any cooling to call its own.This is because the entire temperature record we have is composed of ENSO oscillations whose peaks are spaced approximately five years apart in all instrumental records. They are not hard to find in HadCRUT3 and other similar curves. Those are the peaks some ignorant “climate” scientists call noise and attempt to wipe out with a running average. It is actually amazing that it has not occurred to these “scientists” to wonder why it is that temperature curves from all continents have the same “noise” that so annoys them. But that is just another sad story about lack of scholarship. Fact is, this paper is entirely wrong to ascribe major cooling to volcanoes that demonstrably cannot cool the troposphere.
Second, ferd berple has an excellent question: why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not? The answer is that Arctic warming is caused by strong Atlantic Ocean currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic while Antarctic warming, such as it is, is caused by slow undermining of ice sheets by rising Antarctic bottom water. Arctic warming started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century, paused in mid-century for thirty years, then resumed, and is still going strong.There was no corresponding increase of carbon dioxide in the air and that rules out greenhouse warming as a cause. Additionally on that point, you cannot turn greenhouse warming on and off as happened in the Arctic from 1940 to 1970. As you know IPCC has been showcasing Arctic warming as proof of AGW. They will have to stop that. I actually can’t think of any warming within the last 100 years that can be called an authentic case of greenhouse warming. To get the science, download this: http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf . As I pointed out several times before, Ferenc Miskolczi has shown that the enhanced greenhouse effect they use does not even exist.

When those who believe in alarming global warming scenarios accuse the so called “deniers” of bad faith, we generally don’t like it much.

Similarly, as we accuse Dr Schmidt and others of “fraud” and other misconduct, we can expect that they will be similarly offended.

It seems to me that we would get further here is we concentrated on where we think Dr Schmidt and others have the science wrong, rather than speculating as to their motives. It is hard enough to nail down our own motives, without thinking we understand other people’s.

We can say “the other side started it”, but then they say the same thing and we finish up with “’tis too, ’tis not, …” and nobody learns anything.

Why can’t we set the example: discuss particular flaws in the science, propose falsifiable hypothesis and appropriate experiments/tests to prove our point of view. Try to engage with those we disagree with. If others sink to mud slinging, rise above and try to demonstrate how it *should* be done.

Thanks for the link to your very unusual site. It was I who asked…wouldn’t want Dr Svalgaard implicated in what might be a basic question. It was in regard to a comment by Ferd Berple, who mentioned the magnetic North pole drift, whereupon Dr Svalgaard supplied two charts, each showing the North and South poles drifts respectively.

Went to your site and got promptly lost in going over your wild art…I love it; it’s strikingly similar to Native art and very different at the same time. Almost like automatic doodles, but far more refined, of course.

I read the Abstract of your article, which is as far as my science can take it, and it’s refreshingly unassuming, especially about the mechanism for the magnetic field possibly affecting climate. Have you considered submitting it here? This is something the folks here would be more qualified to comment on…me, I’ll stick to critiquing art! Unfortunately my own art site, linked to my name, is down now and will hopefully come up next week.

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:30 amproducts of incoming particles too energetic to be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetism.
By the same token they are also too energetic to be affected by changes in the sun’s magnetism.

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:56 amThe argument for the temperature rise since the Little Ice Age having been caused by solar activity does not require that late 20th century solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels as Usoskin et al. claim. It only depends on solar activity having been “high,” which does not seem to be in dispute, even by Leif.
Solar activity in the last half of the 20th century was as “high” as in the last half of the 18th and the middle of the 19th.

Leif says: “Solar activity in the last half of the 20th century was as “high” as in the last half of the 18th and the middle of the 19th.”

But it WAS “high” right? I’m saying that, according to the well established correlations between solar activity and climate, this 300 years of high solar activity (interrupted by the Dalton minimum and the turn of the 19th century lull) should cause warming, and if it had continued longer would have continued still longer to cause warming. If Leif disagrees, can he say why?

I know why Solanki and a bunch of others disagree. They claim that the rapid response of temperature to solar activity argues against a long term response, which is absurd. Has Leif got a better argument?

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:51 pmshould cause warming, and if it had continued longer would have continued still longer to cause warming. If Leif disagrees, can he say why?
Generally people consider the time constant of the oceans as far as influence on global temperatures to be of the order of 7 years.

If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down, so the cold period 1400-1700 AD should be the response to low solar activity 300 years before that, in other words the climate should lag 300 behind solar activity. If so, the ‘obvious’ correlation goes away.

Leif also writes: “By the same token [ionizing GCR is] also too energetic to be affected by changes in the sun’s magnetism.”

Not quite. If I may quote Leif’s quote the other day from Svensmark’s recent paper:

Svensmark points out:

“The energetic GCR that ionize the lower atmosphere are only weakly inﬂuenced by variations in the geomagnetic ﬁeld or by solar magnetic activity. Both cause low-altitude ionization rates to vary by (≈10%) in the course of a magnetic reversal or during a solar cycle. Over decades to millennia the GCR inﬂux to the Solar System scarcely changes.”

Thus the climate scarcely changes as well.

“weakly influenced” here means weakly compared to the magnitude of GCR variation that comes from the presence or absence of nearby novae. But Svensmark obviously does not think it is too weak to have a significant effect on climate, and there is no prima facie reason to think that a 10% change in GCR effects is small rather than large compared to CO2 effects.

What percentage of clouds are due to GCR seeding? Svensmark’s and Kirkby’s experiments show that SOME is, but little is still known about the possible magnitude of the phenomenon. If it is large then a 10% variation could explain a lot.

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:30 am
“products of incoming particles too energetic to be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetism.”

Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2012 at 5:12 pm
“By the same token they are also too energetic to be affected by changes in the sun’s magnetism.”

From Svensmark (2012)
Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth

“The energetic GCR that ionize the lower atmosphere are only
weakly influenced by variations in the geomagnetic field or by solar
magnetic activity. Both cause low-altitude ionization rates to vary
by (≈10%) in the course of a magnetic reversal or during a solar
cycle. Over decades to millennia the GCR influx to the Solar System
scarcely changes. On longer time scales, changes in GCR very
much larger than those due to geomagnetic or solar activity occur
as a result of variations in the rate of nearby SNs [supernovae]. Since the the main
ionization in the Earth’s lower atmosphere is caused by 10-20 GeV
GCR, such energies will be implicitly assumed in the following.”

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 7:05 pm
i>Leif also writes: “By the same token [ionizing GCR is] also too energetic to be affected by changes in the sun’s magnetism.”
Not quite. If I may quote Leif’s quote the other day from Svensmark’s recent paper:
Svensmark points out:
“The energetic GCR that ionize the lower atmosphere are only weakly inﬂuenced by variations in the geomagnetic ﬁeld or by solar magnetic activity.
So here he says that the both influences are weak. You exaggerated that to say there was ‘none’ for the geomagnetic field and I carried that same exaggeration over to the sun. What he is saying is that the two effects are comparable.

Over decades to millennia the GCR inﬂux to the Solar System scarcely changes.”
So, the obvious conclusion is that “the climate scarcely changes as well”.

“weakly influenced” here means weakly compared to the magnitude of GCR variation that comes from the presence or absence of nearby novae.
That ‘weakly influence’ clearly does not apply to the geomagnetic field, having nothing to do with nearby supernovae.

no prima facie reason to think that a 10% change in GCR effects is small rather than large compared to CO2 effects.
The effect of GCRs has nothing to do with CO2. You could equally say there is no prima facie reason to think the effect is large compared to CO2. The two effects simply have nothing to do with each other. On top of that Svensmark believes that CO2 has a significant effect. On page 19 he says: “if a cooling reduces the loss of CO2 to geochemical weathering, that could lead to a buildup of CO2 if other sinks and sources of CO2 remain constant, and so dampen or reverse the cooling” [my bold]

little is still known about the possible magnitude of the phenomenon.
So little can be concluded.

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:51 pmshould cause warming, and if it had continued longer would have continued still longer to cause warming. If Leif disagrees, can he say why?
Generally people consider the time constant of the oceans as far as influence on global temperatures to be of the order of 7 years., e.g. see http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
“From energy balance considerations such a global heat capacity yields for the time constant of climate system response (time for e-fold decay of a perturbation) a value of 2.5 years in the absence of feedbacks; inclusion of a feedback factor of up to several fold yields a time constant of up to a decade or so. Similarly short values of the time constant are obtained from analysis of autocorrelation of time series of GMST and ocean heat content.”

There appears to be some sort of denialist conspiracy. The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century. The sun has abruptly changed to something that is related to but different from a Maunder minimum.

Based on what has happened in past – i.e. the paleclimatic record, cycles of abrupt climate change- the planet is about to cool with most of the cooling occurring at high latitude regions, particularly in high latitude Northern regions. The forcing function is a reduction in cirrus clouds (high altitude cirrus clouds warm the planet due to the greenhouse effect). The Antarctic is so cold and dry there is minimal warming due to a reduction in the cirrus clouds.

Fig.3. The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time, which is shown at the right hand side of the diagram. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1855, and the red dotted line indicate the approximate temperature increase since then. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record ends in the year 1777.

Let the AGW back peddling commence.

Press Release June, 2011: Discussing, three papers that were presented at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

http://www2.nso.edu/press/SolarActivityDrop.html
“What’s Down with the Sun? Major Drop in Solar Activity Predicted,
A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).”

“As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all. The results were announced at the annual meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces:
….“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network, said of the results. “But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.” Spot numbers and other solar activity rise and fall about every 11 years, which is half of the Sun’s 22-year magnetic interval since the Sun’s magnetic poles reverse with each cycle. An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots during 1645-1715.

Hill is the lead author on one of three papers on these results being presented this week. Using data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) of six observing stations around the world, the team translates surface pulsations caused by sound reverberating through the Sun into models of the internal structure. One of their discoveries is an east-west zonal wind flow inside the Sun, called the torsional oscillation, which starts at mid-latitudes and migrates towards the equator. The latitude of this wind stream matches the new spot formation in each cycle, and successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.

“We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now,” Hill explained, “but we see no sign of it. This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all.” In the second paper, Matt Penn and William Livingston see a long-term weakening trend in the strength of sunspots, and predict that by Cycle 25 magnetic fields erupting on the Sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Spots are formed when intense magnetic flux tubes erupt from the interior and keep cooled gas from circulating back to the interior. For typical sunspots this magnetism has a strength of 2,500 to 3,500 gauss (Earth’s magnetic field is less than 1 gauss at the surface); the field must reach at least 1,500 gauss to form a dark spot. Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. They also observed that spot temperatures have risen exactly as expected for such changes in the magnetic field. If the trend continues, the field strength will drop below the 1,500 gauss threshold and spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome convective forces on the solar surface.

Moving outward, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program at NSO’s Sunspot, NM, facilities has observed a slowing of the “rush to the poles,” the rapid poleward march of magnetic activity observed in the Sun’s faint corona. Altrock used four decades of observations with NSO’s 40-cm (16-inch) coronagraphic telescope at Sunspot. “A key thing to understand is that those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the Sun,” Altrock explained. “Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the Sun.” Altrock used a photometer to map iron heated to 2 million degrees C (3.6 million F). Stripped of half of its electrons, it is easily concentrated by magnetism rising from the Sun. In a well-known pattern, new solar activity emerges first at about 70 degrees latitude at the start of a cycle, then towards the equator as the cycle ages. At the same time, the new magnetic fields push remnants of the older cycle as far as 85 degrees poleward. “In cycles 21 through 23, solar maximum occurred when this rush appeared at an average latitude of 76 degrees,” Altrock said. “Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we’ll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all. If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23’s magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions (the rush to the poles accomplishes this feat). ”

“No one knows what the Sun will do in that case.” All three of these lines of research to point to the familiar sunspot cycle shutting down for a while. “If we are right,” Hill concluded, “this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”

It is perturbation time + jerk amplitude that matters more so than the stagnant power of a forcing, in a chaotic open system such as our climate. Forget closed system mechanics, they cannot be verified or falsified. Whether or not Leif is correct about the stagnant power of external forcing, it is meaningless. Claiming otherwise is irrelavent fluff.

The global temperature can be calculated easily with 4 variables:

– Solar cycle length
– The magnetic Hale cycle with a 44.5yr governing imput charge-amplitude
– Variations in the AP/AA index for the sake of perturbation only
-Thermal inertia within the climate system, operating on a lag of about 7 years.

ENSO is not climate neutral, neither is the PDO, NAO, AMO, etc. ENSO is climate change in action. Anyone who wishes to understand the aspects of thermal inertia, why a major El Nino will occur during every solar minimum/magnetic polarity arrival interface change, can easily do so. The climate is governed by extreme negative feedbacks to change in stagnant forcing. The opposite is true of perturbation time amplitude change, flow dynamics must be altered so the energy management must redirect to fit a broad scale (reconfigured) photon ‘resonator pulse’.

Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24.
I was actually a co-author of that paper.

‘It seems to me after years of WUWT articles and questions raised here – the more questions and articles presented the less we actually know about how this planet works.’

That’s the quintessential difference between climate alarmists and climate realists. The alarmists reckon they know it all right now, while we realists are simply gobsmacked at the complexity of it all, that our seemingly feeble scientific forays are just beginning to come to grips with.

You can immediately see the fatal attraction for leftists in blind certainty vis a vis those of us who celebrate individual diversity, not to mention our miniscule and humble part in it all. It is that certainty of the vision splendid and the concomitant grand plan that has slaughtered millions and you can smell it all again acridly in the climate alarmists and their credo.

Using edcaryl as my touchstone — how about a new award — the Rube Goldberg Climate Modeling Prize. It might even get a newspaper mention. But what should the prize be? Maybe 1st 2nd 3rd places? What the prizes? The collected works of Lysenko? A box of tinkerstoys? An all expense paid backyard snipe hunt?

Lief’s charts explain my point exactly. The north magnetic pole is moving TOWARDS the geographic pole, resulting in warming in the Arctic. At the same time the south magnetic pole is moving AWAY from the south geographic pole, resulting in cooling. The rate of movement is slower in the south pole, resulting in a slower change in temperature.

Hat tip to Lief for filling in the missing information. Here is the theory stated once more, with Lief’s information added:

ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:26 am

Why is the Arctic warming while the Antarctic is not, as evidenced by ice extent? This cannot be explained by CO2 or aerosols or indeed any product of industrialization.

The most obvious cause is the rapid change underway at the earth’s north magnetic pole. The north magenetic poles is moving from Canada towards Siberia, faster than at any observed time in modern history. As the magnetic pole approaches the geographic pole, polar temperature rise.

At the same time a similar, but slower movement is underway at the south pole, where the magnetic pole is moving away from the geographic pole, result in a cooling, but at a slower rate.

The cause of this climate change is currently unknown to science, but has been widely observed in the past from examination of paleo records. One possible mechanism is the influx of ionized particles from the solar wind entering the earth’s atmosphere at the poles, changing the atmospheric chemistry of the polar regions.

Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2012 at 7:02 pm
If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down, so the cold period 1400-1700 AD should be the response to low solar activity 300 years before that, in other words the climate should lag 300 behind solar activity. If so, the ‘obvious’ correlation goes away.
=======
The lag would be some sort of exponential function, with most of the change occurring early. In effect, it takes the oceans infinitely long to respond fully to any change, but the residual over time becomes so small as to be meaningless. The idea that a change today will not have any effect for 300 years, then suddenly change the ocean temperatures all at once is of course a nonsense.

If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down, so the cold period 1400-1700 AD should be the response to low solar activity 300 years before that, in other words the climate should lag 300 behind solar activity. If so, the ‘obvious’ correlation goes away.

Transport of energy into and out of lower depths doesn’t have to occur at the same speed, but it is probably a reasonable approximation. That doesn’t mean, however, that a 300 year warming input won’t show up for 300 years! It means that it will take until 300 years after the pulse is ended for the warm influence to be expended. But it would START immediately, or in 7 years, which is where the surface temperature response to short term changes shows up.

Leif again:

“Over decades to millennia the GCR inﬂux to the Solar System scarcely changes.”

So, the obvious conclusion is that “the climate scarcely changes as well”.

No. “The GCR influx to the Solar System” refers to the amount of GCR the solar system is receiving from our current neck of the galaxy. It could change quickly if a supernova were to erupt nearby, but I guess Svensmark is here talking about the average, which varies as we travel through spiral arms, and from the view of decades to millenia would essentially be constant.

This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field. These modulations Svensmark puts in the neighborhood of 10%, which could turn out to have a lot of climactic significance, or a little. We don’t know yet. It depends on what % of clouds are being nucleated by GCR and on who knows what else. We have correlation evidence that there is SOME process by which solar activity has a large effect on climate (compared to unamplified TSI changes), but we don’t know if it is Svensmark’s proposed mechanism or not.

Leif:

You exaggerated that to say there was ‘none’ for the geomagnetic field [when Svensmark actually puts it at 10%] and I carried that same exaggeration over to the sun.

“One possible mechanism is the influx of ionized particles from the solar wind entering the earth’s atmosphere at the poles, changing the atmospheric chemistry of the polar regions.”

And / or wavelength changes especially in the UV which affects ozone chemistry differemtly at different levels to alter the vertical temperature profile in the way that would be needed to produce the observed latitudinal shifting of the climate zones with consequent global cloudiness and albedo effects.

“If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down,”

The ocean temperature starts to change as soon as global cloudiness starts to change.

I say that the jetstream tracks moved steadily but irregularly more poleward throughout the period of rising solar activity from Maunder Minimun to recent Modern Maximum so throughout that period cloudiness decreased and the oceans warmed as the lines of air mass mixing became shorter due to increased zonality and poleward positioning.

Only when cloudiness began to increase again in the late 90s as the level of solar activity began to decline significantly would the rate of solar energy injection into the oceans have begun to decline and indeed from about 2003 ocean heat content appears to have stopped increasing.

Meanwhile the jetstream tracks are indeed more equatorward / meridional (and so longer) that they were during the late 20th century.

As long as the sun remains less active the jetstream tracks will continue to be more meridional / equatorward than they were and ocean heat content will continue to drop.

It appears to work on a 1000 year cycle as per MWP to LIA to date. In fact it could be a 1000 to 1500 year cycle which would bring it into line with lots of other evidence of cyclical climate changes of 1500 years in length.

There could well be some phasing interference with the solar cycle effects from the length of the thermohaline circulation causing variability between 1000 years and 1500 years.

Stephen Wilde says:
April 30, 2012 at 12:00 am
In fact it could be a 1000 to 1500 year cycle which would bring it into line with lots of other evidence of cyclical climate changes of 1500 years in length.

Alec,
Thankyou. A very succinct expose of the modus operandi of the Schmidt et. al. pseudo-scientific creed. I regard your following conclusions as having particular importance:

“It is fine for people to be working on these models and trying to make progress with them, but to use them to make claims about what is actually happening in the world is insane, and using them as an excuse for ignoring actual empirical evidence is worse than insane.”

“This really is a new kind of science, and not one that stands up to scrutiny. We are being asked to turn our world upside down on the strength of the most elaborate speculations in the history of mankind, yet Schmidt thinks it is cloud microphysics—traditional science!—that should be eschewed. All to justify the destruction of the modern world, now well underway.”

Indeed. It is oft-said but no less true for it, that we are entering an ‘Orwellian’ truth-inverted reality. And it is happening so quickly!

Without informed and knowledgeable people like you, and websites like WUWT, what chance has the layman of seeing past the conjurors like Schmidt and his fellow CAGW cultists?

For five centuries the Enlightenment has progressed inch by inch – in the early days, marked by the blood of the truly brave ‘reason’ and ‘knowledge’. But has the CAGW cult now marked its high water mark. It’s zenith? Only time will tell, of course. But it certainly is of great cause for concern that the rapid ascendance of these cultists to positions of authority within our once-esteemed ‘learned’ institutions, and the megaphones our politically-driven propagandists have put in fornt of them, points to a sinister trend unfolding before our eyes and ears in our time.

Using more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. I was actually a co-author of that paper.

Thank-you for your comment and your contribution to this forum. I have read your papers.
I believe there will be observational evidence – solar and terrestrial – to support what I said in my comment. Cycles require a forcing function, cycles repeat.

There are cycles of warming in the paleo climatic record followed by cooling and in some case abrupt cooling.

As “Schmidt 2005 and Miller 2012” noted there is also an increase volcanic activity during the cycle. Volcanic eruptions only cool the planet for a short period of time and hence cannot explain cyclic cooling of 400 years to 1200 years. Schmidt and Miller do not provide an explanation of the warming portion of the cycle. There is concurrent with the abrupt cooling an abrupt change in the geomagnetic field. It is the abrupt change in the geomagnetic field that causes the long term terrestrial cooling. (The sun returns to its normal cycle.) The geomagnetic field specialists appealed to planetary cooling somehow (no mechanism provided) causing changes to geomagnetic field.

There are concurrent changes in cosmogenic isotopes during the cycle. It appears the sun is causing the warming, the increase in volcanic activity, and the abrupt change to the geomagnetic field.

ABRUPT CHANGE IN EARTH’S CLIMATE SYSTEM
What do we mean by abrupt change? Alley et al. (2), in a seminal paper arising from a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report (5), followed on the original definition of abrupt change (6): an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Others have defined it simply as a large change within less than 30 years (7) or as a transition in the climate system whose duration is fast relative to the duration of the preceding or subsequent state (8).

Further analysis of diverse records has distinguished two types of millennial events (13). Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) events are alternations between warm (interstadial) and cold (stadial) states that recur approximately every 1500 years, although this rhythm is variable. Heinrich events are intervals of extreme cold contemporaneous with intervals of ice-rafted detritus in the northern North Atlantic (24–26); these recur irregularly on the order of ca. 10,000 years apart and are typically followed by the warmest D/O interstadials.

Cold-climate abrupt change occurs with a characteristic timescale of appro.1500 years, a feature that must be explained by any proposed mechanism. North Atlantic and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) records exhibit a period of approx.1470 years (64, 65). However, the adjacent ice core isotope record from the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) site exhibits periods closer to 1670 and 1130–1330 years, which is in agreement with the independently dated record from Hulu Cave (49, 66). Time series studies generally converge on a picture of a noisy climate system paced by a regular, perhaps external, forcing, with the sensitivity of the system to the forcing varying depending on background conditions or stochastic variability [e.g., (67– 69)]. Solar forcing, although subtle, is the leading candidate for external forcing and has been found to be consistent with either a 1450–1470–year period (70, 71) or the 1667- and 1130-year periods (66).

http://www.geo.uu.nl/~forth/people/Hirokuni/Hiro2002a.pdf
Orbital Influence on Earth’s Magnetic Field: 100,000-Year Periodicity in Inclination
A continuous record of the inclination and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field, during the past 2.25 million years, was obtained from a marine sediment core of 42 meters in length. This record reveals the presence of 100,000-year periodicity in inclination and intensity,…

My comment: The cyclic changes orbital inclination does not cause the cyclic changes to the geomagnetic field. It is orbital inclination and the timing of perihelion determines the hemisphere which is primarily affected when the interrupted solar magnetic cycle restarts. It is the sun that causes the geomagnetic field changes.

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
Recent palaeomagnetic studies suggest that excursions of the geomagnetic field, during which the intensity drops suddenly by a factor of 5 to 10 and the local direction changes dramatically, are more common than previously expected. The `normal’ state of the geomagnetic field, dominated by an axial dipole, seems to be interrupted every 30 to 100 kyr; it may not therefore be as stable as we thought.

Recent studies suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field has fallen dramatically in magnitude and changed direction repeatedly since the last reversal 700 kyr ago (Langereis et al. 1997; Lund et al. 1998). These important results paint a rather different picture of the long-term behaviour of the field from the conventional one of a steady dipole reversing at random intervals: instead, the field appears to spend up to 20 per cent of its time in a weak, non-dipole state (Lund et al. 1998).

Peter Kovachev says:
“I read the Abstract of your article, which is as far as my science can take it, and it’s refreshingly unassuming, especially about the mechanism for the magnetic field possibly affecting climate.”

If you download the paper it is quite easy to read, basically it shows the correlations and cites some very interesting papers. Courtillot et al, and others found correlations between the local magnetic field preserved in pottery and local climates so it does suggest there is a link between magnetism and climate, even if we cannot be sure what it is. It’s worth reading this in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (EPSL) entitled “Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?” by V. Courtillot, Y. Gallet, J.-L. Le Mouël, F. Fluteau, A. Genevey (2007) EPSL 253, 328.

I was lucky to meet Prof. Courtillot and he told me of the terrible attacks of the French press on his paper just because it suggested the CO2 theories might not be the source of our climate change and global warming. He was also disappointed that he could not therefore, give his students climate related subjects for their Phds as “ their careers would be over before they started”

What seems likely to me is that GCRs and solar particles follow the force lines and where they meet at the poles, presumably more particles reach the lower atmosphere as there is less resistance here and somehow have an influence on the climate, but I would welcome any comments. The pottery studies suggest that some other mechanism might be at work. Those studies go back a lot further in time, I was limited because the instrument temperature record was only available since the 1830s. I was fortunate that after the paper was published Dr Simon Bray of the University of Southampton ran the Spearman Pearson Product Moment test on my correlations that in addition to my statistics basically showed there is very little chance of the correlations being due to chance.

Thanks for the comments about my art. I found doodling helped me concentrate at meetings and all the black and white ones were done at meetings.

Here is the abstract for anyone interested.

Abstract:
Many natural mechanisms have been proposed for climate change during the past millennia, however, none of these appears to have accounted for the change in global temperature seen over the second half of the last century. As such the rise in temperature has been attributed to man made mechanisms. Analysis of the movement of the Earth’s magnetic poles over the last 105 years demonstrates strong correlations between the position of the north magnetic, and geomagnetic poles, and both northern hemisphere and global temperatures. Although these correlations are surprising, a statistical analysis shows there is a less than one percent chance they are random, but it is not clear how movements of the poles affect climate. Links between changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and climate change, have been proposed previously although the exact mechanism is disputed. These include: The Earth’s magnetic field affects the energy transfer rates from the solar wind to the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn affects the North Atlantic Oscillation. Movement of the poles changes the geographic distribution of galactic and solar cosmic rays, moving them to particularly climate sensitive areas. Changes in distribution of ultraviolet rays resulting from the movement of the magnetic field, may result in increases in the death rates of carbon sinking oceanic plant life such as phytoplankton.

Alec Rawls says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:09 pmBut it would START immediately, or in 7 years, which is where the surface temperature response to short term changes shows up.
As I said, there is no significant lag expected between solar forcing and climate.

This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field.
He says they are modulated equally by both, in contrast to your claim that they were not.

We have correlation evidence that there is SOME process by which solar activity has a large effect on climate (compared to unamplified TSI changes), but we don’t know if it is Svensmark’s proposed mechanism or not.
With no lag it seems. BTW, the cosmic ray proxies are influenced by climate. Webber estimates at least 50% of the signal is climate related. Solar cycle activity does cause a 0.1C climate variation, but there is no evidence for a large change. Quite the contrary. Solar magnetic activity now is down to the level of a century ago, while climate is not. Solar magnetic activity in the latter half of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th was on par with that of the latter half of the 20th, yet the climate was different.

William Astley says:
April 30, 2012 at 3:16 amI believe there will be observational evidence – solar and terrestrial – to support what I said in my comment. Cycles require a forcing function, cycles repeat.
There will be evidence, is very different from there is evidence.

I have read your papers.
And yet you persists with: “The sun was at its highest activity level in 8000 years during later half of the twentieth century”

According to Sidorenkov & Barkin:
distribution of water over the planetary surface
3 states of water
depression & rebound of crust by ice

all a function of circulation which is a function of temperature gradients which are a function of season and to a lesser extent thermal inertia (ENSO) and to an even lesser exent the solar cycle — although the latter’s small, it’s cross-ENSO-phase-averaged semiannual component accumulates into the multidecadal component, which cannot be detected empirically without the proper use of tuned multiparameter complex aggregation

coherence is complex due to differing field asymmetries and time-differential spatial-change across depth, medium, & height

Thanks for your confidence in my hereto undiscovered abilities to process scientific papers, Adrian. I’m going to give this an honest shot, so I began as I usually do things by sniffing at the general background of the issue and around the “peripheries.” This I did by looking at Prof Courtillot’s paper, “Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?” and a critique by E. Bard and G. Delaygue, gleefully re-posted in RealClimate at http://www.realclimate.org/images/BardDelaygue.pdf. It seems that, as usual, the arguments are about the quality and interpretation of temperature data sets. I wish I didn’t hyperventilate at graphs and numbers. However, I am concerned that it may be impolite to hijack Alec Rawl’s excellent paper and I still think you should present a piece to Anthony. With the heavy-hitters here, you will get the kind of peer review the Warmistas only pretend to get.

On a slightly different topic, and my apologies for going OT, but I noted that you publicised your getting harrassed by the now-infamous Norfok Police for making a humdrum FOIA request to East Anglia U. Judging by your description and looking at things with Canadian eyes, your rights were clearly violated and it’s your local police force which needs to be examined with an 8″-wide sand paper-coated speculum by a drunk proctologist. It seems to me, too, that this event was not sufficiently covered which, in spite of the officials’ usual requests to keep such things quiet, makes you and others much more vulnerable. I’m sure you are aware that the skeptic blogger, “Tall Bloke,” has also been bullied, I think around the same time, by the same constabulary. To me, living in Canada, the idea that the nation which gave birth to the principles of civil rights allows such blatant violations is a shocker. Here, it would be front page matter, and the case would, rightfully be described as police corruption, resulting in heads rolling, especially those of the senior investigators and the chief of the police division. I’ve been mulling about collectively forming an international group based around a website which would aggressively publicise such cases of intimidation and misconduct, seek funding for aggressive publicity and legal actions, and pre-arrange pro bono representation by “recruiting” interested organizations and attorneys. Off-hand, I’d say you and Tall Bloke should chat and perhaps together you should be communicating with skeptic celebrities like James Dellingpole and Lord Montford. This is a looming battle, on that’ll be heating up as this scam unravels, and with a lot of angry people who have reputations and a lot of money riding on it. Unfortnately, the skeptics’ strength which is in the independence and lack of centralized direction is also its weakness; litigous individuals and organizations with unlimited funds and compliant or corrupted authorities will able to quietly go after the “irritants” one by one. Data security and bullying by authorities have been a topic here at WUTW and should be brought again more seriously. Of course, this is up to Anthony. I’m ready to volunteer my time and skills, having worked with colleagues on setting up secure server sites for sensitive commercial data and hard-to-track communication, and would be glad to assist in any way I can. Canada, whose government is currently involved in pushing back the warmist monololies and foreign attempts to scuttle our energy policies (e.g., NGOs such as Tides Foundation and the Saudis), is an ideal electronic “meeting place” for such a venture. And, as I mentioned before, the social and political “climate” here is very harsh on the kind of semi-legal bullying and casual rights-trampling which seems to be increasingly occuring in the EU.

Paul, you then must also believe that CO2 is causing warming. Its proposed (and yet to be proven) driver of the supposed amplification of water vapor is as believable as your amplifications related to solar metrics. In fact more so.

I made a comment a couple of years ago along the lines that maybe the poles were driving climate rather than the other way around. It was in response to claims of polar amplification. I was simply trying to point out that we lack so much knowledge of the climate system that we could have things completely backwards.

Now, could it be there is something to this idea? We know that heat moves from the equator to the poles as part the Earth’s mechanism to remove heat from the system. If the poles warm then that flow of energy will slow down. And, that could lead to warming of the non-polar regions. So, in fact, all it would take is a warming of the poles to cause a warming of the planet.

After reading the comment about movement of the magnetic poles leading to either warming or cooling of the polar regions do we now have a mechanism to warm the poles independently? If so, then it seems we also have a mechanism to warm the planet. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the changes in climate we’ve seen from the MWP to the LIA to the present is caused by this simple mechanism. Instead of polar amplification we would have the poles driving the overall global temperature.

Now for another big “what if”. Since the magnetic poles can move independently we’d have a way for the SH to cool while the NH warms. What if a buildup in this heat imbalance led to a change in the major air flow patterns of the planet. What if all of a sudden we had heat from the NH directed to the SH to balance the heat flow of the planet. What if this led to extreme cooling of the NH. What if glaciers started to form, enhance this cooling and lead to glaciation. And, finally, what if it takes about 90K years for the Sun to direct enough heat towards the NH to melt those glaciers and start the next interglacial period.

The last what if … what if this process started on 12/21/12? ;)

OK, that’s a lot of “what ifs” and unlikely to be true. My real point is, once again, we could have no idea about the major factors influencing climate.

Leif Svalgaard says:
April 30, 2012 at 5:52 am
“Solar magnetic activity now is down to the level of a century ago, while climate is not. Solar magnetic activity in the latter half of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th was on par with that of the latter half of the 20th, yet the climate was different.”

Cosmic ray flux was much different in the 20th century than during those periods, if judged from older studies made in the less political era like the Be-10 reconstruction highlighted in Beer et al. 1994 (before the post-Mann-era):

You left our argument in the prior thread, which has its references, as soon as I posted it in reply:

Presumably, when confronted this directly, you’ll be forced to reply, but replying by implying that the older studies were so vastly wrong and that you are right in being in utter contrast to them would only be convincing if someone has reason to trust you to be unbiased.

“Leif again:
>> “Over decades to millennia the GCR inﬂux to the Solar System scarcely changes.”
>> So, the obvious conclusion is that “the climate scarcely changes as well”.

No. “The GCR influx to the Solar System” refers to the amount of GCR the solar system is receiving from our current neck of the galaxy. It could change quickly if a supernova were to erupt nearby, but I guess Svensmark is here talking about the average, which varies as we travel through spiral arms, and from the view of decades to millenia would essentially be constant.

This says nothing about how much this incoming GCR is being modulated within the solar system by solar activity and by the earth’s magnetic field. These modulations Svensmark puts in the neighborhood of 10%”

You are quite correct to point such out.

The thing is, though, Dr. Svalgaard already knew that, anything else being impossible with his background. If one rules out accidental inaccuracy from lack of knowledge, only one possibility remains. Dr. Mann (of hockey stick fame) and Dr. Hansen have done their part for revisionism of the temperature side of aiming to disprove the link between the sun/GCRs and temperature, but the CAGW-promoting side is not foolish enough to only revise one aspect of history at a time. Dr. Svalgaard’s writings about cosmic ray flux (and solar activity) having not changed much over the past several centuries, such as recent history compared to the LIA, is in utter contrast to such as Beer et al. 1994 (made in a less political era, as is the case with Eddy 1976):

Some skeptics are too trusting of anyone who makes an one-liner remark claiming to not support the CO2-dominant hypothesis where it conveniently causes some to let down their guard, but look at someone’s actual overall direction of argument, of publications, etc. to see reality.

Pamela Gray (April 30, 2012 at 6:21 am)
“Paul, you then must also believe that CO2 is causing warming. Its proposed (and yet to be proven) driver of the supposed amplification of water vapor is as believable as your amplifications related to solar metrics. In fact more so.”

I go on data, not theory. And indeed there’s a ‘warming signal’ at semi-annual & annual, but how can we rule out the possibility that it’s due to slow deep ocean warming as the continents continue rebounding from ice depression (or a combo)? I want to work on this with the mainstream, but most (all?) are afraid to touch it (fearful of losing grant money, administrative politics, etc.) Another administrative problem: No local academic I’ve spoken to in person feels qualified to supervise a PhD on this – and to be frank: I agree. With proper support I could move orders of magnitude faster.

>Alec Rawls says:
>April 29, 2012 at 11:30 am
>Michael Whittemore refers to the Laschamp event as a contra-indication to the GCR-cloud theory. >At that time, about 40,000 yrs ago, the planet’s magnetic field was very weak, allowing lots of GCR >to reach the surface, which shows up in the 10be isotope record, yet there was no dramatic cooling >as Svensmark’s early work suggested there should be:

As I recall from an earlier discusssion, the variation in the 10Be record in the Greenland ice cores you attributed (part of its variation at least) to differing wind patterns depositing 10Be unevenly (with the presumption that even if it had been created ‘smoothly’ the deposits were uneven) and that the face value of the deposits were unreliable.

I have a nagging question from that discussion and a new question from this one. The 10Be record not from ice cores from at a more equatorial position may give a more accurate record of GCR, revealing less dependence on winds reaching the poles. I wondered if that had been investigated comparing it with the ice record. This new angle begs the same question:

>But Svensmark solved that riddle. The planet’s magnetic field only deflects the weakest cosmic rays >while the one’s that ionize the atmosphere are the strongest cosmic rays. The 10be record measures >both so when the record jumps due to a weak planetary magnetic field 10be ceases to be a predictor >of climate.

If the planetary magnetic field is varying resasonably independently of the Sun’s, and the planetary one is not strongly affecting the GCR (because it is so much smaller), then the 10Be records in equatorial and high latitude records both need to be ‘corrected’ to separate the high energy GCR from the low. It occurs to me that the relative proportions of 10Be, 13C and 14C might provide that clue.

It is unlikely that high energy GCR’s reaching the Earth won’t create very small cloud condensation nuclei. It is unlikely that in their absence they will form spontaneously. Before we devote much time to pooh-poohing GCR => 10Be + CCN being a significant cooling influence, we should address these two tweaks to the 10Be record: 1) using records that depend less on wind (if that was not a red herring in the first place) and 2) separating 10Be created by high and low(er) GCR’s. After all, Svensmark’s claim is not really that cosmic rays create cloud condensation nuclei, it is that very high energy ones do.

Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:41 amPresumably, when confronted this directly, you’ll be forced to reply, but replying by implying that the older studies were so vastly wrong and that you are right in being in utter contrast to them would only be convincing if someone has reason to trust you to be unbiased.
I trust myself as being unbiased with no dog in the race. All the experts [Beer, Usoskin, Solanki, Lockwood, me, and assorted other luminaries] in this are have agreed to assemble in Berne, Switzerland under my leadership a week from today to discuss the matter: http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
If you look at Figure 2 you can see that the cosmic ray proxies have been rather constant the past 300 years. As the cosmic ray modulation is believed to be controlled by the sun’s magnetic field as drawn out into interplanetary space [the Heliosphere] the level of the cosmic rays is often expressed as the equivalent magnetic field strength [the one that would yield the observed radionuclides].

ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 10:28 pmOne possible mechanism is the influx of ionized particles from the solar wind entering the earth’s atmosphere at the poles, changing the atmospheric chemistry of the polar regions.
This is just coincidences. And the poles at the surface which the maps showed are not the poles the solar wind sees. Those have hardly moved at all. The magnetic poles seen by the particles are the so-called ‘corrected geomagnetic poles’.

“Stephen Wilde, do you think maybe you’re diverting too much attribution from circulation to cloudiness? (And do you think THC is independent of atmospheric circulation?)”

Not really, because air circulation changes in themselves would not affect the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans. Only cloudiness and albedo changes will achieve that.

The THC is not independent of air circulation but nor is it independent of sea surface temperatures. Both are relevant and each leads to a response to solar changes on different timescales which is why we should acknowledge that the effects of the THC could be either in or out of phase with solar variability at any given time.

So, the sun might well vary on an approximate millenial timescale but the THC takes longer and so alters the timing of the climate response which could explain why the frequency of Bond events is not exactly the same as the millennial solar variability.

Geoff Sharp says:
April 30, 2012 at 7:12 amIf we had the measuring equipment of today would the Maunder and Dalton minima record EUV & FUV measurements anywhere near what would be expected of SC19?
Not even close.
But they would be very close to those measured at every solar minimum, e.g. 1954 just before cycle 19 and 2008 just before cycle 24: Figure 1 of http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Flux-and-Sunspot-Number.pdf

One of the most telling deficiencies in the Shindell-Schmidt GISS GCM as quoted by Alec above is: “Cooling in the tropical and subtropical upper troposphere is even more pronounced (0.8°C) because of cloud feedbacks, including an 0.5% decrease in high cloud cover induced by ozone through surface effects.” One half of one percent variation in the parametrized value of one of the least effectively modeled variables of a chaotic climate system causes eight tenths of a degree centigrade change in temperature! Does anyone really believe that high cloud cover might not vary by one half of one percent over time as result of any number of natural processes including the possibilities of Svensmark’s GCR-cloud or simple randomness within a chaotic system as has been suggested by Richard Lindzen? Shindell-Schmidt go on to say: “This cooling substantially reduces the latitudinal temperature gradient in the tropopause region, decreasing the zonal wind there at ;40°N. Planetary waves coming up from the surface at mid-latitudes, which are especially abundant during winter, are then deflected toward the equator less than before (equatorward Eliassen-Palm flux is reduced by 0.41 m2/s2, 12° to 35°N, 300 to 100 mbar average), instead propagating up into the stratosphere (increased vertical flux of 6.3 3 1024 m2/s2, 35° to 60°N, 100 to 5 mbar average) (29). This increases the wavedriven stratospheric residual circulation, which warms the polar lower stratosphere (up to 1°C), providing a positive feedback by further weakening the latitudinal temperature gradient.” Talk about the butterfly effect! And precisely and accurately attributed to “ozone through surface effects”?

Stephen Wilde (April 30, 2012 at 8:30 am) responded:
“Not really, because air circulation changes in themselves would not affect the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans. Only cloudiness and albedo changes will achieve that.”

I’m not convinced by your cloud argument because it can’t be backed up with data, but you make good points about thermal wind (jets) …and those points will be even better when you work seasonal variability into your narrative.

…..Given these realities, it would seem essential for climatologist to reconsider their position on the Svensmark Effect, because if they are wrong in their assumptions, $TRILLIONS could be wasted in CO2 initiatives, and food preparations need to be taken now, because some of the worst famines in human history took place during the Wolf and Maunder Minima.

Again, despicable.
___________________________________
Given the politics surrounding CAGW, I have no doubt at all that those in power are well aware that we are headed into a Minimum with the accompanying famines. If they are not aware of it they are very much trying to force a famine in the near future anyway. However you look at it politicians are aware of the prospect of a coming famine and making sure their corporate buddies reap the full benefit: All you have to do is look at the 25x’25 Renewable Energy Initiative
Here is the Media Hype:25x’25 Vision: By 2025, America’s farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.
The resolution passed both houses. WUWT has the newest iteration here.

Press Release // 06/07/2006 // BOLD NEW U.S. ENERGY GOAL UNVEILED ON HILL: 25 PERCENT OF ENERGY FROM RENEWABLE SOURCES BY 2025
Bipartisan Proposal has Broad Support from Agriculture and Industry Leaders, Governors, States
A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives introduced a Congressional resolution today calling for a new national renewable energy goal: 25% of the nation’s energy supply from renewable sources by 2025. The resolution builds on a broad and politically influential coalition including agriculture, industry, and environmental leaders, as well as several governors and state legislatures. http://www.25×25.org/text/xml/2.0//www.infocastinc.com/www.infocastinc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=56

July 22, 2008
….Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept and consider it an ill advised response to today’s unprecedented agricultural market situation….

Again, we encourage you to reject calls for the establishment of an international or national grain reserve…
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Kendell Keith, President National Grain and Feed Association
Gary C. Martin, President and CEO North American Export Grain Associationhttp://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf

And here is the actual reason for the letter:

Food shortfalls predicted (1/04/2008):
….The world is eating more than it produces and food prices may climb for years because of expansion of farming for fuel and climate change, risking social unrest, experts at the International Food Policy Research Institute concluded in a new report issued last month….

In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends – and this niche – very attractive…. http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/dancy/2008/0104.html

It also explains the massive land grab now going on. You can start with NAFTA removing about 75% of the farmers in Mexico as setting the precedence.

…Prior to NAFTA, small plots of land were permanently deeded to Mexico’s peasant farmers. In preparation for NAFTA, Mexico was required to change its constitution to allow foreign ownership of this land and allowed these plots to be sold or seized by creditors. In addition, NAFTA opened the door for the dumping of large amounts of subsidized U.S. agricultural goods on the Mexican market –
lowering prices and endangering the livelihood of peasant farmers. For example: Corn is the primary crop in Mexico, but post-NAFTA farmers received 70% less for their harvests…. more than 2 million Mexican farmers have been forced off their land since NAFTA was enacted….

Corporate Rights over People and the Environment
One of the most controversial aspects of NAFTA is found in Chapter 11 – its investor rights chapter. Under Chapter 11, foreign investors who believe their profits are being harmed by environmental or public health regulations can sue governments for cash damages within a secretive trade tribunal system. This occurred when Mexico was sued by the U.S. Metalclad Corporation, a waste-disposal company. Metalclad accused the Mexican government of violating Chapter 11 of NAFTA when the state of San Luis Potosi refused permission to re-open a waste disposal facility. The State Governor ordered the site closed down after a geological audit showed the facility would contaminate the local water supply. The Governor then declared the site part of a 600,000 acre ecological zone. Metalclad claimed that this constituted an act of expropriation and sought millions in compensation. The company won and was awarded $16.5 million (plus interest)
from Mexico….

The World Trade Organization is NAFTA taken to a worldwide scale. Clinton ratified both treaties. The result was the bankrupting of third world countries’ farmers. 8 million people in India have quit farming, and the spate of farm suicides – the largest sustained wave recorded in history – causes a farmer to suicide every 30 minutes. link

October 23, 2008 ….Former President Clinton told a U.N. gathering Thursday that the global food crisis shows “we all blew it, including me,” by treating food crops “like color TVs” instead of as a vital commodity for the world’s poor.

…Clinton criticized decades of policymaking by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, encouraged by the U.S., that pressured Africans in particular into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs as a requirement to get aid. Africa’s food self-sufficiency declined and food imports rose.

Two years later another Mia Culpa from the world leaders. Note how they think we forgot all about the first time and the fact they had been warned of the coming problems in 2007, well, actually as early as 1974

3/20/2010
….world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They’re led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton – now U.N. special envoy to Haiti – who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti’s rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/with-cheap-food-imports-h_n_507228.html

After you boot the peasants off the land and brought their governments to near bankruptcy, it is time to move in for the kill….

…..several American universities, including Harvard, Vanderbilt, Spellman, and Iowa universities, are also taking part in or providing funds for the practice that “is resulting in the displacement of small farmers, environmental devastation, water loss and further political instability such as the food riots that preceded the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions,” the reports states.

While the report does not claim the deals break any laws per se, it does strongly insinuate the local population does not reap anything near the promised benefits, whereas the mostly foreign investors in some cases can expect to get up to 25 percent returns….. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20070234-503543.html

…The scale of such land acquisitions has increased greatly. From 2004 to early 2009, at least 2.5 million hectares were transferred in five African countries alone (IFPRI). Recent estimates point to land acquisitions that each encompass millions of hectares of land. Of concern is that the land leased by African governments to foreign interests was previously occupied by poor local and indigenous populations who have little control over such land transfers…. http://www.brookings.edu/articles/2010/0625_africa_land_aryeetey.aspx

…..Over the past few years hedge fund gurus like George Soros, investment powerhouses like BlackRock, and retirement plan giants like TIAA-CREF have begun to plow money into farmland – everywhere from the Midwest to Ukraine to Brazil. Canadian private equity firm AgCapita, which raised $18 million in 2008 to invest in Saskatchewan cropland, estimates that as of the first quarter of 2009, more than $2 billion of private equity money had been raised for farmland investments globally, and another $500 million was planned.

The growing flow of money into farms has persisted despite a major drop in the commodities markets last fall, prompted in part by the global financial crisis. In the spring of 2008 spiking grain prices caused food shortages and rioting in dozens of countries before falling some 50% by December. In fact, that crash has obscured a broader trend. Even after the correction, grain prices remain above their 20-year average, and food stocks around the world are still near 40-year lows….. http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/08/retirement/betting_the_farm.fortune/index.htm

I trust myself as being unbiased with no dog in the race. All the experts [Beer, Usoskin, Solanki, Lockwood, me, and assorted other luminaries] in this are have agreed to assemble in Berne, Switzerland under my leadership a week from today to discuss the matter: http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf
If you look at Figure 2 you can see that the cosmic ray proxies have been rather constant the past 300 years. As the cosmic ray modulation is believed to be controlled by the sun’s magnetic field as drawn out into interplanetary space [the Heliosphere] the level of the cosmic rays is often expressed as the equivalent magnetic field strength [the one that would yield the observed radionuclides].

No, both Be-10 and C-14 cosmic ray proxies have not been remotely constant during the past 300 years, when seen in typical data published prior to the past 10-15 years. Your figure 2 differs substantially from such as the following C-14 cosmic ray / solar activity reconstruction:

While there are also others such as Eddy 1976, the above sampling of both Be-10 and Carbon-14 reconstructions published before the past decade shows them finding cosmic ray flux to be substantially different than in the LIA, than in the prior several centuries before the 20th century. Solar activity in the 20th century was unusually high compared to prior centuries since the end of the MWP.

Someone doesn’t post many times in every WUWT thread about solar/GCR-temperature connections, sometimes within 5 or 10 minutes of an article being published, always arguing against solar-climate connections, because they simply have “no dog in the race.” People don’t expend great effort without serious motivation. That is more like the style of members of the Wikipedia “consensus”-enforcing team like William Connolley.

Yes, you are a professional member of the well-funded “consensus,” even your paper using the term “consensus,” much like Dr. Mann who himself greatly contradicted prior studies made in an earlier era before the AGW “consensus” starting getting practically enforced, his graph highlighted in the IPCC’s political Summary for Policymakers representing the “consensus” of the IPCC’s numerous scientists (or so they would say, although someone attending a conference or submitting comments does not mean they agree with everything).

Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:09 amYes, you are a professional member of the well-funded “consensus,”
All the graphs you have shown are by the established consensus, traditional wisdom, trotted out again and again, without regard to the latest developments. What I’m trying to do is departing from the consensus, from the die-hard myths, from established ‘knowledge’. All those things you defend. That I have managed to get all the producers of those established myths to sit up and take notice and agree to come to our workshop should tell you that perhaps those myths are not well-founded as you think.
My motivation is very simple: to bring the latest exciting research on trends in solar activity to a wider audience, so they can make their own judgment.

If it takes three hundred years for the oceans to warm up, it also takes three hundred years for them to cool down, so the cold period 1400-1700 AD should be the response to low solar activity 300 years before that, in other words the climate should lag 300 behind solar activity. If so, the ‘obvious’ correlation goes away.

I think that is a bit of a non-sequitur. There are many asymmetric processes. As a specific example, the ice builds up over about 100,000 years in a glacial, then all melts off in just a few thousand. One is mass transport evaporation rate limited to snow. The other is mass transport unlimited rate and enhanced via rain as runoff.

The resultant ice graphs look very much like a long slow rise and rapid drop in ice volume.

Surface heating will tend to stagnate warm water at the top. Cooling will form cold descending fluid columns and more rapid mixing. Salinity decreases will sit on top. Salinity increases will accelerate turnover via density driven decent of fluids. etc.

So to me it looks like the assumption of symmetrical heat flow rates is unsupported.

Earth’s climate system responds to perturbations on numerous time scales from short — diurnal, annual — to long –multiple centuries (warming of the deep oceans) to millions of years (Kelvin and “the age of the Earth”). Here I argue that the time scale pertinent to climate system response to forcings over decadal scales is that associated with change in global mean surface temperature GMST. On such time scales GMST is tightly coupled to the ocean mixed layer, which provides virtually all the heat capacity of the system, global mean areal heat capacity 9.4 W yr m^-2 K^-1 (100 m depth; fractional ocean area 0.71). Recent compilations of the rate of increase in the heat content of the oceans over 1960-2000 together with the observed rate of increase of GMST over this time period permit determination of the heat capacity pertinent to climate change as 9 W yr m^-2 K^-1, uncertain to 50%, comparable to that of the ocean mixed layer. From energy balance considerations such a global heat capacity yields for the time constant of climate system response (time for e-fold decay of a perturbation) a value of 2.5 years in the absence of feedbacks; inclusion of a feedback factor of up to several fold yields a time constant of up to a decade or so.

There is an explicit recognition of external climate driving events of many time periods, many durations. We then find that their estimate of only those things that change GMST in time periods of interest to them have an error of 50%. Further, we find that this short time period has to do with the degree to which the GMST is coupled to the ocean mixing layer. It says very little about what would happen with shifts to the size of the ocean mixing layer, changes in the thermohaline circulation, or even just very long duration overturning of the ocean deeps.

It looks to me like they have a short cycle bandbass on their study area of interest and you then use their short term findings as justification that there are no longer term cycles. I find that unconvincing.

@Hu McCulloch:

You were looking at sunspots and not finding a nice temperature wiggle match:

Look at this graph of Magnetic Storms.

While it gives a nicer ‘wiggle match’ to temperature curves, Leif doesn’t like it and asserts it is in error. I’m in no place to arbitrate between the British Geological Survey and Leif, so you will need to look at both and decide for yourself who has it right.

Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:09 amsomeone attending a conference or submitting comments does not mean they agree with everything
That is not what the workshops are for. We are having them because the establishment [whom you quote all the time] have seen that something is not right and need to be fixed.

E.M.Smith says:
April 30, 2012 at 10:51 amAs a specific example, the ice builds up over about 100,000 years in a glacial, then all melts off in just a few thousand.
Very different from ocean heating.

There is an explicit recognition of external climate driving events of many time periods, many durations. It looks to me like they have a short cycle bandbass on their study area of interest and you then use their short term findings as justification that there are no longer term cycles. I find that unconvincing.
a few centuries is short term. There are certainly much longer term changes, e.g. orbital ones.

While it gives a nicer ‘wiggle match’ to temperature curves, Lief doesn’t like it and asserts it is in error. I’m in no place to arbitrate between the British Geological Survey and Lief, so you will need to look at both and decide for yourself who has it right.
That graph is based on a threshold analysis of the aa-index which everyone nowadays agree is in error [too high after 1957]. E.g. ” Various tests have indicated that there are some problems with the homogeneity of the calibration of the aa index, particularly after 1957 (Svalgaard & Cliver 2007a; Rouillard et al. 2007; Lockwood et al. 2009b).” from http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/700/2/937/fulltext/ and see their Figure 11.

Also even speaking only about TSI there is a point that needs to be clarified:
The TSI reconstruction that we see also in woodfortrees is only the PMOD composite is strongly contested.
The ACRIM composite which shows a slight increase and not a decrease as PMOD is being pushed back – even if it relies only on measurement and not on more unreliable proxy:http://www.acrim.com/TSI%20Monitoring.htm

Another interesting point to see is the error bar : I understand that now the 1360 W/m2 becomes the cannonical number for solar irradiance – the instruments measured various other number and – even 1372 W/m2 – and needed to be cross-calibrated. But the accuracy in measuring earth energy balance is pretended to be 0,1 W/m2
Even PMOD is showing 1365 W/m2

“Yet Miller never noted this coincidence. In fact, he tried to hide it,” – the good – or bad part about this – depends how one looks at it – is that if this is theory is confirmed in the future they cannot claim any contribution to it, leaving room for other scientists to advance science.
We have seen many times in the past the consensus trying to keep the established theories and stop progress, this is no new news unfortunately, it was the way how science advanced most of the time.

Richard B Woods;
In addition to ice extent, ice thickness needs to be considered. There is thinning in the Antarctic as well as the Arctic.
>>>>>>>>

Some places yes some places no. But extent trumps thickness anyway. For ice to form on salt water, all the water below the surface right to the bottom must first cool to the freezing point. A thin layer of ice represents a gigantic amount of water cooling.

Nice attempt at a misdirect though. Are you a lawyer?
_____________________________________
David I think Richard B Woods is this guy:
Dr. Richard B Woods

Richard leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans (CCO) group in the Met Office Hadley Centre.
Richard is head of the CCO group, whose remit covers modelling the role of the oceans and ice in the climate system. In addition, CCO acts as a focal point for policy-focused science to inform climate change mitigation strategies aimed at avoiding dangerous climate change…. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/richard-wood

Lars P. says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:12 amAnother interesting point to see is the error bar : I understand that now the 1360 W/m2 becomes the cannonical number for solar irradiance – the instruments measured various other number and – even 1372 W/m2 – and needed to be cross-calibrated. But the accuracy in measuring earth energy balance is pretended to be 0,1 W/m2
You are confusing systematic errors with random [measurement] errors. What is important is the relative precision of the variation, and that is 0.007 W/m2. The systematic errors tend to be constant, e.g. the difference between 1360 and 1365. For ACRIM and earlier instruments there is a systematic error of about 5 W/m2 due to scattered light, i.e. light that reaches the sensor from elsewhere that directly through the entrance hole. This is now well understood and agreed upon: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2010GL045777.pdf

Lars P. says:
April 30, 2012 at 12:45 pmIf there has been a systematic error of 5 W/m2 for “energy in” has there been another systematic error of 5 W/m2 of “energy out”? Where?
Not quite as 30% is reflected before it gets ‘in’. But that 5 W/m2 difference does not make any real difference in the budget at the level of accuracy of our understanding.

vukcevic says:
April 30, 2012 at 1:27 pmIt is regrettable that few of those IPCC scientists know of, and even fewer if any understand the sun – earth – temperature multi-decadal link.
This is not ‘understanding’ or even valid science as we have discussed so often before.

Richard leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans (CCO) group in the Met Office Hadley Centre.
Richard is head of the CCO group, whose remit covers modelling the role of the oceans and ice in the climate system. In addition, CCO acts as a focal point for policy-focused science to inform climate change mitigation strategies aimed at avoiding dangerous climate change…. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/richard-wood ”
– –
Gail,
Did you notice that the Richard Wood in the Met Office Hadley Centre does not have an “s” in his last name, while my last name does? I don’t live in the UK and have no connection to the Met Office. Why do you misspell Dr. Wood’s name as “Dr. Richard B Woods”?

Leif Svalgaard says: April 30, 2012 at 2:20 pmThis is not ‘understanding’ or even valid science as we have discussed so often before.

You can do the Antarctic delta Bz yourself (delta t =20 years).
I am sure you do understand it perfectly well, it just happens you don’t like what you see; to the delight of Usoskin, Solanki, Lockwood and other assorted luminaries, it blows the SSN revisionist science into pieces. However, I think you are correct about the Svensmark’s hypothesis, as it can be easily concluded by comparing opposing trends at the poles.

vukcevic says:
April 30, 2012 at 2:58 pmI am sure you do understand it perfectly well, it just happens you don’t like what you see
I see wiggles, but they have nothing to do with each other. In order to ‘not like’ something it has to make sense. If it does not, it is just thrown on the junk heap with nary a thought or dislike.

Leif Svalgaard says:
I see wiggles, but they have nothing to do with each other. In order to ‘not like’ something it has to make sense. If it does not, it is just thrown on the junk heap with nary a thought or dislike.

An idea:
*We know that the suns main effect on warming the air is that first, it warms the water, which then warms the air.
*We know thatt here are various currents and waves (ENSO and the like) which have various timed cycles (decadal, multi-decadel etc). Specifically, we know that these different cycles have different timings, in relationship to each other, some shorter, some way longer.
*The sun goes into, say, a Grand Minimum.
*It’s main effect is to heat or not heat water differently than it did before (either directly, or through some emechanism like increased clouds resulting in increased shade). This of course assumes that anything all all different actually happens.
*If this is the way things are working, then a change in the sun will not result in a matching change in the climate, because the different simescales of all the largly water based effects of the heating will result in very diffeent timescales for any solar effected change in different areas. That is, in areas where there is no current, the change may be relatively quick, in areas with a decadal oscillation, it may take up to a decade, in areas with a multi-decadal oscillation, multi decades, etc.
*In other words, if the suns effect is indirect, modulated through various cycles that take varying lengths of time, you should expect that changes in the sun, wiggles on your graph, will not cause immediate and worldwide changes in climate, matching wiggles on a climate graph. The changes un the sun may still cause noticable changes in climate, but it could be hard to spot on a worldwide scale since the changes will show up in different places at widely varying times, and in some places the effects of corcings, feedbacks, and thermostated effects of various intensity may amplify or even entirely counteract the effects of the sun in that area. About the only thing you could see clearly might be if there is large changes by the sun (say the Maunder) and matching largish changes by the climate over a long timescale, probably at least several decades, OR, changes in some areas that are dramatic enough to be noticed in the case that some areas are not effected by the sun due to local thermostate or forcing/feedback effects.

Or to put it another way, with all the various climate cycles of various timeframes on this planet, I would actually be very suprised if wiggles seen on a graph by the sun created matching wiggles of climate. I would expect that it would take a longish period of several Grand Minimums to make a semi matching period of cooler weather, which appears to be what happened in the LIA.

Speaking of which, you say “http://www.leif.org/research/Svalgaard_ISSI_Proposal_Base.pdf If you look at Figure 2 you can see that the cosmic ray proxies have been rather constant the past 300 years. As the cosmic ray modulation is believed to be controlled by the sun’s magnetic field as drawn out into interplanetary space [the Heliosphere] the level of the cosmic rays is often expressed as the equivalent magnetic field strength [the one that would yield the observed radionuclides].

Yes, “rather constant” for 300 years, however, what about that 1700 dip? THAT was NOT rather constant, that looks large enough to have caused some climate change, was there any climate change at around that time? Note the above, the change may be different timing wise in different areas of the earth due to the effects of different timescale currents and other cycles.

And that brings me to one last point. If we are going to really solve the issue of what causes say, a Roman Warm Period, followed by a cooler Dark Ages, followed by a warmer MWP, followed by a cooler LIA, followed by the current modern warm period, and whether these are caused by periodic changes in the sun, what we need is, first, proxies that show past periods of warmth and cooling, which we have, and past periods that show changes of the suns magnetic field, which we can then look at to see if they match timeswise. Do we have proxies that go back far enough and are reliable enough to tell the suns magnetic activity during past peroids of known warmth and cooling? If they match up, we will then know that there is significant corellation between what the sun does and climate, at least when what the sun does is different enough long enough to matter. If the sun goes grand Minimum a,d every time hte earths climate cools, then it does, it will not matter whether we agree on the mechanism for it or not, if it does it, it does it. Are there such solar matgnetic proxies going far enough back, then we can at least answer that question.

If there are not, then we are stuck with a very limited, perhaps too limited, dataset to answer the question. I mean, the LIA lasted a rather longish time, and our dataset appears to only go back as far as the latter part of it, or even just to the tail end of it. That is far to small a dataset to really be sure. We would really need multiple Grand Minimums to match up with the known multiple cool peroids to really be sure. All I see right now is one partial dataset, part of a known cool period matching with part of a proxie of the suns magnetic activity.

And this of course is only the proxies we have, can we know what, say, the speed of the solar wind was 300 years ago if that speed may vary independantly of such magnetic proxies as we have? Can we be sure that the one always effecs the other, can the solar wind slow down while the proxies show only a smaller change? After all, we do not have DIRECT solar wind measurments from back then, so we really would need to know if the proxies and solar wind (and other things that may effect climate, such as changes in UV) actually always match up. I beleive it is said that it is changes in the solar wind speed and pressure that effect cosmic rays, so what we really need to know is the speed of the solar wind, which we cannot directly measure back that far in time.

SHORT FORM:
If you look for matching wiggles on solar magnetic activity and climate, you may not find them because the timings of the varoius climate cycles will throw them off. The best you can hope for is for very large (say Maunder Minimum sized changes or multiple Grand Minumums) solar changes to match longish period climate changes, lomg enough to smooth out these introduced cyclic variables. Big picture, see it, small picture, not see it.

To really see the above big picture, we would need to look back at, say, the last 10,000 years of solar and climate cycles, and see if there is a match, can we do that?

Leif Svalgaard: I have no doubt that over time, by default, more will overcome their remaining qualms until even solar history revisionism helping lead to blaming the Little Ice Age on volcanoes (not matching the timing of its start, magnitude, nor duration) or the new trend of lol BS about claiming the relatively tiny number of humans back then caused it instead of any impact of http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg becomes standard, if not blaming on utter vagueness that nobody can even link to a write-up of over relevant timeframes in any real detail. Ideological polarization increases over time, as does what people feel they can get away with. But I’m not so naive as to think it matters what I say to you directly except when there are other readers as an audience, and this isn’t the best thread for most matters now since no longer on the front page.

Legatus says:
April 30, 2012 at 9:40 pmI mean, the LIA lasted a rather longish time, and our dataset appears to only go back as far as the latter part of it, or even just to the tail end of it. That is far to small a dataset to really be sure.

Actually there is data beyond that.

Although not all grand minimums, there are around 5 local minimums and 5 maximums matching in
(and 1 that doesn’t but not bad for a complex system with multiple influences and some random measurement errors)

Leif Svalgaard says: April 30, 2012 at 8:51 pm
…………………..
dt should be 20 years, geographic locations we can discuss some other time, they are related to the transpolar and the circumpolar currents, since it is those two that are fundamental for understanding hemispheric climate/temperature changes, rather than the geographic or magnetic poles.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TSA.htm
Ignoring your temperature graph, it is more than clear that now you also understand the connection , but the interpretation is a matter of your choice.

Henry Clark says: April 30, 2012 at 11:23 pm
…………..
Clouds and temperature are two components of closed concurrent positive and negative feedback loops (degree of evaporation, air circulation due to changes in atmospheric pressure, precipitation, day & night, summer & winter, etc ), any attempt to disentangle them, is unlikely to be successful.

“Clouds and temperature are two components of closed concurrent positive and negative feedback loops (degree of evaporation, air circulation due to changes in atmospheric pressure, precipitation, day & night, summer & winter, etc ), any attempt to disentangle them, is unlikely to be successful.”

Certainly they are related.

There would, of course, be an influence from solar activity variation other than the impact on cosmic rays (where Shaviv estimates the latter to be on the order of twice the effect of TSI variation with TSI varying far less in percentage terms). Cloud cover variation can be influenced by temperature changes even while cloud cover variation simultaneously causes temperature changes too. But an example of the overall picture is the graphs in the papers linked in my prior comment. It is unfortunate I can’t post images directly in comments here, as that cripples illustration.

The degree of correlation between cloud cover variation (at the appropriate altitude) and cosmic ray flux variation is still more than that for cosmic ray flux versus temperature, for fluctuations on the shortest time scales, since the latter has extra substantial influence from other factors, although the papers linked in my last comment show both. The latter paper linked shows a comparison to temperature trends in figure 2, including with El Nino deductions, although my graph of Dye 3 Be-10 cosmic ray flux versus Loethle temperature data at http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg is essentially that on a 600-year timeframe (without trying such deductions for ocean variation but with them less critical for seeing the basic picture on the larger timescale).

Especially at the smallest time scales, there are some significant differences between sunspot number trends and cosmic ray flux trends; for instance, sunspot numbers in the last cycle were declining substantially since 2002 whereas cosmic ray flux didn’t start its corresponding rise much until the start of 2004:

Henry Clark says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:20 pmOnly “rather constant” if someone throws out every contradictory source of data, like those I previously mentioned (among really many others but as a sample):
You are still quoting a lot of establishment graphs [most of which are not independent]. The motivation for this may be ideological, but science in the end triumphs.

vukcevic says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:50 pmdt should be 20 years
It shouldn’t matter much what dt is, except that higher time resolution is always better. In any case you can just smooth the 10-yr curves.

Ignoring your temperature graph, it is more than clear that now you also understand the connection
I carefully showed that there is no ‘connection’ to understand.

Legatus says:
April 30, 2012 at 9:40 pmYes, “rather constant” for 300 years, however, what about that 1700 dip? THAT was NOT rather constant, that looks large enough to have caused some climate change, was there any climate change at around that time?
It probably was CAUSED in large part by the climate, see e.g. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.2675.pdf
line 222 ff: “Indeed this implies that more than 50% the 10Be flux increase around [the dip in solar activity], e.g., 1700 A.D., 1810 A.D. and 1895 A.D. is due to non-production related increases”
See also slide 47 in http://www.leif.org/research/The%20long-term%20variation%20of%20solar%20activity.pdf showing that there was a well-developed solar magnetic field in 1706

Leif Svalgaard says:
April 30, 2012 at 1:53 pm
“Not quite as 30% is reflected before it gets ‘in’. But that 5 W/m2 difference does not make any real difference in the budget at the level of accuracy of our understanding.”
———————————————————————————————————-
Leif the 30% above confirms again that the reflected energy calculation is also only a rough approximation based on input and not on real measured data.
Systematic bias is systematic error in energy budget calculation. One cannot say that 0.1 W /m2 is energy imbalance when all input and output may contain systematic errors of +- 5 W/m2.
But this was OT to the blog-post.

Coming back to topic, you were saying that we can understand variances in the sun’s output by 0.007 W/m2. Sorry, this is wide overstated.
The paper itself highlights the error exceeding previous confidence statements: “This fundamental difference” – the 5 W/m2 – “exceeds prior measurements’ reported uncertainties of ∼1.3 W m−2”
Even in Lean’s paper one can see the grey area marked as uncertainty (Fig 1.b). Furthermore the paper discounts 1 W variances measured by instruments based on other proxies and models.

Whereas it may or may not be right, shows still the problems in instrumental measurements and the over reliance on models.
Only during the last decade do we really start to have real data that could measure variances closer to where the human influence could be: TIM, ARGO, Envisat, Jason2 and what we see is a lot of data that does not fit the current dogma.

Leif Svalgaard says:
May 1, 2012 at 4:10 am
——————————————————————–
What are the error bars on your solar reconstruction in this plot?

Also, concerning the long term affect of consistently high solar activity, what is the pecentage change in the one percent spectrum of solar activity which reaches the disphotic zone? Also, what is the resdience time of that energy, and might it not be far longer then seven years? Indeed,, solar energy constitutes a rather vast spectrum, so what is the residence time within the earths ocean of each spectrum, and how much does each spectrum change over a solar cycle?

My questions pertain to OHC, others may have similar questions pertaing to atmospheric changes over long periods of time. As basic ocean cycles appear to be multi decadal, all forcings of shorter and longer duration have to be sorted through these various filters.

I suggest that the error bars on solar reconstructions is perhaps quite large. Below, (W.R. Webber1, P.R. Higbie2 and C.W. Webber3), notes how the climate can affect the 10be ice core proxy. However the problem with past climate reconstructions is that their resolution is not able to detect such fine changes. Indeed, one of the “team” membes states that as far as 100 year resolution we know xxxx-all, about climate, although I am however, not that sceptical.

Leif and others suggest that sun spot counts are a better method of determing past solar activity. This, in and of itself, is somewhat problematic, although some claim to have accurately assembled past sun spot records for several hundred years at least. To get accurate error bars on solar activity correlation to climate it appears we need error bars on both recordes, as well as the ability to determine the residence time of various solar spectrum within the earths system, particularly the oceans, as welll as greater understanding of cloud formation mechanics and jet stream movements.

The answer may be, we simply do not know the past with the accuracy necessary to determine correlations and possible causeations, and should instead concentrate on the most recent solar cycles and climate observations whrere we have much better observations.

Webber1, P.R. Higbie2 and C.W. Webber3
“155 The large scatter between the 10Be ice core measurements and 10Be production
156 calculations and the resulting lack of correlation on a year to year basis, described above, could
157 arise in several ways. Two possibilities are; 1) Severe climatic effects on a time scale ~1-2 years
158 or less (e.g., Pedro, et al., 2006). These effects could be very local or more general effects
159 covering large geographic scales. 2) “Instrumentally” based effects that somehow introduce a
160 large variability in what are more uniform variations.”

Lars P. says:
May 1, 2012 at 4:19 amComing back to topic, you were saying that we can understand variances in the sun’s output by 0.007 W/m2. Sorry, this is wide overstated. The paper itself highlights the error exceeding previous confidence statements
You are still confusing accuracy and precision. The systematic error is constant, thus does not influence the precision. To illustrate the difference, imagine you have a weighing scale and uses that to measure your weight every day, your loss and gains with a precision of one ounce. After a month you discover that it matters whether you have your clothes on or not, there is a three pound difference. That is the systematic error, but since it is constant [assume always the same clothes] the difference does not distort a graph of your weight loss or gains. That is the precision.

David A says:
May 1, 2012 at 5:05 amWhat are the error bars on your solar reconstruction in this plot?
I suggest that the error bars on solar reconstructions is perhaps quite large.
The error bars on the cosmic ray – based recontructions are large, but can diminish in time as methods get better and many more cores are analysed.

Leif and others suggest that sun spot counts are a better method of determining past solar activity. This, in and of itself, is somewhat problematic
The sunspot number is a count and as such does not have error bars: if you count the coins in your purse and find you have $2.57, what is the error bar on that? The problem with the sunspot count for really old records [200+ years ago] is the lack of systematic counting and how to calibrate one casual observer against another.

To get accurate error bars on solar activity correlation to climate it appears we need error bars on both records
And it turns out that the climate record is less known than the solar activity record. Yet, in spite of all those errors, there are people that claim fantastic and overwhelming correlations between the records…

Leif Svalgaard says:
May 1, 2012 at 7:26 am
Coming back to topic, you were saying that we can understand variances in the sun’s output by 0.007 W/m2. Sorry, this is wide overstated. The paper itself highlights the error exceeding previous confidence statements
——————————————————————–
You are still confusing accuracy and precision.
——————————————————————-
Thanks Leif for the explanation on systematic errors, but you missed the part: … the paper discounts 1 W variances measured by instruments based on other proxies and models…
“Although ACRIM I, ACRIM II, ACRIM III, VIRGO, and TIM all track degradation with redundant cavities, notable and unexplained differences are evident in Figure 3a among their reported irradiance variations and in Figure 3b with the modeled influences of sunspots and faculae (shown in Figure 1c and used to estimate climate responses in Figure 2). Features not easily attributable to solar activity include an annual cycle that is nearly in phase with the Sun‐Earth distance in ACRIM III data, and 90‐day spikes in the VIRGO data coincident with SoHO spacecraft maneuvers that are most apparent during the 2008 solar minimum.
Disagreement among overlapping observations, as apparent in Figure 3, indicates undetected drifts that suggest the TSI record is not sufficiently stable to discern solar changes on decadal time scales. For example, Figure 3b shows that only the ACRIM composite shows irradiance increasing by ∼1 W m−2 between 1986 and 1996; if real, the solar origins of this increase are ambiguous since it is also absent in the model.”

“From energy balance considerations such a global heat capacity yields for the time constant of climate system response (time for e-fold decay of a perturbation) a value of 2.5 years in the absence of feedbacks; inclusion of a feedback factor of up to several fold yields a time constant of up to a decade or so. Similarly short values of the time constant are obtained from analysis of autocorrelation of time series of GMST and ocean heat content.”

I critiqued a later version of this Schwartz paper last year. Schwartz’ model is built on a single heat sink. That is, it assumes that the whole ocean warms at once and hence can be represented by measured top-water temperatures. Not that Schwartz was actually so silly as to think that this is what is really going on. He just thought that this was the right model to look at to analyze short term changes in global surface temperatures, as he explained at the beginning of his abstract:

Earth’s climate system responds to perturbations on numerous time scales from short — diurnal, annual — to long — multiple centuries (warming of the deep oceans) to millions of years (Kelvin and “the age of the Earth”). Here I argue that the time scale pertinent to climate system response to forcings over decadal scales is that associated with change in global mean surface temperature GMST. On such time scales GMST is tightly coupled to the ocean mixed layer, which provides virtually all the heat capacity of the system, global mean areal heat capacity 9.4 W yr m-2 K-1 (100 m depth; fractional ocean area 0.71).

Schwartz’ very first sentence acknowledges that heat transport into and out of deeper ocean layers can easily take centuries. For Leif to represent this paper as arguing AGAINST century scale warming and cooling of the oceans is pretty bad.

Have a good trip Leif! And if you get a chance, do point out to Solanki that rapid responses to short term forcings (which he found between solar activity and global temperature) do not militate against longer term responses to longer term forcings, but actually imply them. Really, it an absurd mistake for solar physicists to be making, and it needs to stop. This is Solanki’s excuse for claiming that the sun can’t be responsible for late 20th century warming, even though he thinks that solar activity was, up until the last couple of decades, the primary driver of global climate. He’s essentially claiming that because the day warms quickly in response to the rising sun, the planet can’t warm more slowly in response to increased seasonal insolation, and on the basis of this “science” he is willing to support that “consensus” that we have to unplug the modern world. Please call him on it! (You just may have to call yourself on it first.)

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:29 am
========================================================
I do not know why it appears so hard for some to understand the potential for greater then seven year affects of solar insolation. This is why here I earlier asked Leif, “concerning the long term affect of consistently high solar activity, what is the pecentage change in the one percent spectrum of solar activity which reaches the disphotic zone? Also, what is the resdience time of that energy, and might it not be far longer then seven years? Indeed, solar energy constitutes a rather vast spectrum, so what is the residence time within the earths ocean of each spectrum, and how much does each spectrum change over a solar cycle? Leif answered my other queations, but chose not to answer what I consider to be the most important in regard to OHC. Solar affects on cloud formation , and potentialu jet stream locations, are of course another large area of limited but growing understanding. Thank you for your posts highlighting how the IPCC chooses to inform their ignorance.

Lars P. says:
May 1, 2012 at 9:09 am“Figure 3b shows that only the ACRIM composite shows irradiance increasing by ∼1 W m−2 between 1986 and 1996; if real, the solar origins of this increase are ambiguous since it is also absent in the model.”
what this is all about is really just polemic against the ACRIM data. All instruments show degradation, even TIM. The trick is to account for it correctly. Very recent work reported at the SORCE meeting last fall in Sedona acknowledges that the calibration was not done correctly. With this taken into account the simple conclusion was: “Observed data do not support a measureable TSI trend between the minima in 1996 and 2008 !” [W. Schmutz]. The 0.007 W/m2 I referred to is TIM’s precision. You are still mired in the question of absolute accuracy which is about 0.2 W/m2. BTW, I have been working with the TIM team and actually discovered the 90-day ‘keyhole’ problem and uncompensated degradation of PMOD: http://www.leif.org/research/PMOD%20TSI-SOHO%20keyhole%20effect-degradation%20over%20time.pdf
Since then the various issues have been resolved as reported at the 2011 SORCE meeting.

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:29 amGMST is tightly coupled to the ocean mixed layer, which provides virtually all the heat capacity of the system, global mean areal heat capacity 9.4 W yr m-2 K-1 (100 m depth; fractional ocean area 0.71).
There is a lot of handwaving and half-thruths here. There is no doubt that the time scale for heating the whole ocean is thousands of years, but the time scale for the top 100 m is much shorter, less than a decade, and that is where most of the climate response on decadal and century scale comes from.

Really, it an absurd mistake for solar physicists to be making, and it needs to stop. This is Solanki’s excuse for claiming that the sun can’t be responsible for late 20th century warming
No, his claim is that before the late 20th century one could claim that there was a reasonable correlation [whether real or spurious] with no significant lag. Now this correlation has broken down showing that either the correlation was spurious to begin with, or that it was real and CO2 caused the breakdown.

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:29 amReally, it an absurd mistake for solar physicists to be making, and it needs to stop.
All the babble about lags and inertia is moot as far as I am concerned, because no matter the lag, the sun does simply not vary enough to begin with [all variation we know of on reasonable time scales is due to variations of the magnetic field]. There is a clear 11-yr cycle which should give about 0.1K variation. Some people claim to have demonstrated twice that [and that I can live with] and that without any lags: http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf
You can, of course, claim that there really is a lag of precisely a large integral number of solar cycles [for example 112 cycles for a lag of 1243 years], but I would not take that seriously.

No, his claim is that before the late 20th century one could claim that there was a reasonable correlation [whether real or spurious] with no significant lag. Now this correlation has broken down showing that either the correlation was spurious to begin with, or that it was real and CO2 caused the breakdown.

Climate systems respond on MULTIPLE time scales. Solanki focused on the very visible rapid response of temperatures to short term forcings. Observing that short term response, he should expect longer term forcings to create longer term responses, such as a longer term warming in response to what in your own characterization was 300 years of mostly “high” solar activity.

Solanki’s finding on short term responses to short term forcings was a briefly lagged correlation with a magnitude of about .7. That means 30% of the time his wiggle-matching is not lining up and certainly some of that would be because there is a disjoint between what is going on with the short term wiggle-matching vs. the longer term wiggle-matchings.

Solanki does not claim, each time there is a decade where his short term wiggle matching is out of alignment, that something has broken the relationship and the sun no longer drives climate… only to turn around and say that it goes back to driving climate a decade or three later. Instead he says that the overall high correlation shows that the sun is driving climate. What justification is there for changing that now? To say only about the last disjoint episode that it implies a breaking of the long-term relationship, that is highly unscientific, especially when there is an obvious explanation in terms of the longer period forcing of the solar variable itself.

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 7:50 pmInstead he says that the overall high correlation shows that the sun is driving climate. What justification is there for changing that now?
That the variables he correlated are not well determined, although, of course, there are people who say that because of the ‘overall high’ correlation, the proxies must be very good, indeed.To say only about the last disjoint episode that it implies a breaking of the long-term relationship, that is highly unscientific
No, that is the way a spurious correlation shows itself. What looked good, turns out not to hold up. Happens all the time and is how science works by discarding theories with failed predictions.especially when there is an obvious explanation in terms of the longer period forcing of the solar variable itself.
That works both ways, a low solar forcing would need a long time to show up in climate as there is a lot a heat stored in the oceans [by your argument].
Anyway, my main argument is the Sun has varied very little [especially magnetically] so cannot explain significant variations of climate.

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 7:50 pmTo say only about the last disjoint episode that it implies a breaking of the long-term relationship, that is highly unscientific
To give you an example: in the past, the solar polar field has been a good indicator of the size of the following solar cycle. Based on that [and some physical dynamo theory] I predicted that cycle 24 would be the smallest in a hundred years. If it turns out that SC24 becomes large, and this long-term relationship is broken, that implies that my theory was wrong. This is highly scientific, but I guess you would say that it is highly unscientific and that my theory is good, nevertheless. Right?

As I already noted Leif, 30% of the time Solanki’s correlation is violated, yet he has not interpreted these episodes as implying that the sun was not at these times driving climate, nor should he. The short term correlation can be obscured by longer term correlations, by ocean oscillations, by volcanic activity, and who know what. It is unscientific to treat one decade, the 1990’s, when global temperature seemed to take a step up from 1980 levels, differently from these other departures from Solanki’s observed correlation. This is especially true when solar cycle 22 seems to have been as strong as any in the record. It exhibited lower GCR than cycle 19. The idea that the hypothesis of a solar-climate driver is busted by this coincidence between especially high solar activity and a modicum of warming is quite amazing.

If you really think this episode of too much warming busts the solar warming theory (in spite of the fact that late 90’s warming was boosted by an obvious El Nino) then please apply the same standard of falsification to the CO-warming theory, which at its lowest bound predicted far more recent warming than has occurred. That, after all, is Solanki’s alternative hypothesis. He is holding that the much LESS busted solar theory should give way to the much MORE busted CO2 theory.

Personally, I don’t see how the solar theory is busted at all by a modicum of warming coincident with high solar activity. The very idea is ludicrous, and the rapid ocean equilibration assumptions that you and Solanki invoke to support it do not stand up to the least bit of scrutiny.

Now the sun has gone quiet and warming has stopped. Do you STILL think there has more recent warming than can be explained by solar activity?

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 9:28 pmNow the sun has gone quiet and warming has stopped.
The sun is still shining and is still warming us [it was 78F outside today]. If it takes centuries to warm up a degree it will also take centuries to cool down a degree [unless you can produce a peer-reviewed paper that specifically goes though the physics so show why not], so we should not be able to see any cooling above the noise for a long time to come.

Do you STILL think there has more recent warming than can be explained by solar activity?
As far as I’m concerned, none of the climate variation is caused by solar activity beyond the expected 0.1K solar cycle variation.

Personally, I don’t see how the solar theory is busted at all by a modicum of warming coincident with high solar activity.
Argument from ignorance is not very fruitful. Just because you can’t see something, does not mean it can’t happen.

The very idea is ludicrous
Is a preconceived notion.

and the rapid ocean equilibration assumptions that you and Solanki invoke to support it do not stand up to the least bit of scrutiny.
Red herring. We don’t need the whole ocean to come to equilibrium, or rather, since there is no significant external forcing, there is nothing to come into equilibrium with. And don’t think I agree with Solanki. I do not. But Svensmark does [see page 19 of his paper].

If it takes centuries to warm up a degree it will also take centuries to cool down a degree [unless you can produce a peer-reviewed paper that specifically goes though the physics so show why not], so we should not be able to see any cooling above the noise for a long time to come.

As we have both recently noted, the upper ocean layer responds quickly to changes in solar forcing, so no, the expectation is not that it will take a long time for cooling to be evident. Rather, while upper ocean cooling should be evident quickly, the amount of cooling will be moderated for centuries as stored heat is drawn out of deeper ocean depths by the not-as-warm-as-they-were surface waters.

You need a peer reviewed paper to affirm such an obvious bit of reason? Bah. The peer reviewed literature is just about the last place to look for a competent analysis of anything having to do with climate science. The field is utterly debased. What decent research gets through peer review is in spite of, not because of.

Thanks Leif, that information is helpful, although not quite clear. On page three, at 250 to 325 nm I see (if I am reading this correctly) a large flux ( 7 to 10 mw/m2/nm ) in the 250 to 325 nm range. If I am reading this correctly then the tropical absobtion graph on pg 5 ?, shows this spectrum reaching the surface. Is that what you see?

Alec Rawls says:
May 1, 2012 at 10:59 pmAs we have both recently noted, the upper ocean layer responds quickly to changes in solar forcing, so no, the expectation is not that it will take a long time for cooling to be evident.
My expectation is that warming and cooling are symmetric. It takes x years to warm up and x years to cool down. Any claim of something different will have to be supported by quantitative analysis of a specific physical mechanism, no hand waving.

David A says:
May 2, 2012 at 5:55 amIf I am reading this correctly then the tropical absobtion graph on pg 5 ?, shows this spectrum reaching the surface. Is that what you see?
The absorption graph shows the heating associated with the flux and is logarithmic. Look at the scale with the “E”s. Perhaps only about a 1/1000 gets through, so in practice there is really nothing there. Note the insert at the upper right.

Leif: I didn’t suggest any asymmetry between warming and cooling. There certainly could be, but it is probably reasonable to expect that it would take heat the same amount of time to escape any particular ocean layer that it took for the heat to get in. That implies a pattern to warming or cooling.

When it has been relatively cool for a while, as at the bottom of the LIA, the deeper ocean layers have had a time to expel a pile of stored heat (or store some cold, if one prefers). Then if there is a warming force (say an increase of insolation, either from TSI variation or from GCR-cloud effects or some other source) the upper ocean layer responds quickly, allowing global surface temperatures to respond quickly, but it doesn’t get as warm as it would if deeper ocean layers were not so cold. The cold deeps draw down some of the surface warmth, storing it.

After a few hundred years of this, the deeper ocean layers will have stored a substantial amount of heat. If the warming force goes away (say the sun goes into a quiescent phase) the upper ocean layer would be expected to respond quickly, but it doesn’t cool as much as it would if deeper ocean layers were not so warm. The warm deeps draw down some of the surface cold, storing it.

– Below 30-40 degrees latitude total heat flux is negative (downward)
– At higher latitudes total heat flux is positive (upwards)
– Change in the flux is dependant on the ocean currents and their intensity.
– Stronger currents transfer more energy pole-ward, altering the previous state in all latitude regions.
– Gulf (N. Atlantic drift), Kuroshio and the transpolar currents drive the N. Hemisphere change. .
– Circumpolar current is a principal component in the S. Hemisphere.
For all practical purposes it could be considered that the tropical and subtropical solar input is more or less constant, but the currents velocity and the heat transport are not.
Bi-decadal change in the geomagnetic field is a good proxy of the saline surface volume movements, and at the same time it correlates to a degree with the solar magnetic activity; this is not known or understood by those who would be expected to know.
Mutual correlation among these three variables is non-stationary, for number of reasons; one is the hysteresis (dependence of a system not only on its current but also on its past relevant physical state) applicable to both the water heat content and the geomagnetic variability.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TSA.htm
It is the oceans that are principal regulators of the global temperatures on the century long time scale. The GCR and the CO2 are unlikely to have significant input on any of the above.

Alec Rawls says:
May 2, 2012 at 5:49 pmIf GCR is responsible for any substantial amount of cloud formation then its 10% modulation by solar activity would have a significant effect on all of the above.
However, solar activity is now on par with what it was a century ago, yet the climate is not.

solar activity is now on par with what it was a century ago, yet the climate is not.

It stopped warming. It has to do that first, right?

The natural experiment of the sun going quiet is so far proceeding according to expectations from the solar theory of late 20th century warming. The lack of warming for over 10 years now suggests that solar effects are at least as large as CO2 effects. If they are the same size, temps will most likely oscillate around present temps for as long as solar activity remains low. If solar effects are larger than CO2 effects then the planet will start to cool. Either result reduces the warming possibly attributable to CO2 to non-dangerous levels.

Alec Rawls says:
May 2, 2012 at 8:31 pmThe lack of warming for over 10 years now suggests that solar effects are at least as large as CO2 effects.
I don’t know why you are so hung up on either of those. In my view, none of them are significant and you can’t play them against each other, since none of them matters.

If solar effects are larger than CO2 effects then the planet will start to cool.
And if the planet does not cool [it hasn’t yet], then you’ll conclude that it is CO2 after all?

Alec Rawls says: May 2, 2012 at 8:31 pmThe lack of warming for over 10 years now suggests that solar effects are at least as large as CO2 effects.

Not necessarily. Neither CO2 nor TSI may be responsible.
The AMO is one of the strongest ‘natural change’ components in the Northern Hemisphere, and according to the BEST natural variability report in the global land temperatures too.
Also it should be remembered that the AMO and the global temperatures are closely synchronized
It can be shown that the AMO (generated in the high latitudes of the N. Atlantic) is directly related to the NAO’s northern component – Icelandic Low, with about a decade delay.
The AMO (on decadal scale) has been more or less static since late 1990shttp://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm (see the lower graph)
So question is: is the Icelandic Low driven by TSI?
I think not, as shown here:
(note time shift in the ‘driving’ forces)

Leif: The CO2 theory is falsified on several grounds so I would not easily come around to giving it any significant credence, but the ultimate test IS prediction. It takes a long time to tell much from surface temperatures, but if ocean heat content were seen to clearly start rising then yes, I’d have to give some credibility to the CO2 theory.

Of course I don’t expect that to happen. It would fly in the face of the mountain of evidence that the primary driver of past temperature change is the sun and/or GCR (none of which depends on the second half of the 20th century exhibiting an extraordinarily high level of solar activity).

That mountain of evidence is the reason I am “hung up” on the solar explanation. As for why I am “hung up” on pointing out the falsification of the CO2 theory, you might want to poke your head out sometime and observe that a large percentage of your colleagues are declaring that the danger of CO2-driven warming necessitates the abandonment of the energy infrastructure the enables the modern world.

You dismiss the mountain of solar evidence, but the way you argue your case is often just silly, like earlier in this thread, citing Schwartz 2006 against century scale warming and cooling of the oceans when Schwartz’ very first sentence acknowledges that heat transport into and out of deeper ocean layers can easily take centuries. Or when you claim that a 300 year warming process would mean a 300 year delay in warming. I just shake my head.

I’ve spent a lot of time documenting the illogical grounds on which Solanki and others try to dismiss a solar explanation for late 20th century warming. If you’ve got something to add, I’m not finding it in your slap-dash rebuttals.

The one thing you have said that I have some sympathy with is your criticism of the correlation studies as weak and often contradictory. I’m not convinced on the contradictory part. Rapid responses to short term forcings are not at odds with longer term responses to longer term forcings. They actually imply longer term responses. Still, when studies claim to find responses with long lags, that does seem awfully weak. A long lag is not a reasonable way to represent a longer term response.

Maybe that is the source of your suggestion that 300 year warming process would cause a 300 year delay in warming. Maybe you were goofing on those correlation studies that invoke 300 year lags. But that is a small fraction of the solar-climate evidence.

Alec Rawls says:
May 3, 2012 at 9:44 amMaybe that is the source of your suggestion that 300 year warming process would cause a 300 year delay in warming.
That source is you, when you claimed that it took three hundred years of warming to get us out of the LIA, but that a ‘quieter sun’ recently will plunge us right back into another LIA with no delay [I would think that would take another 300 years to get back down there]. But it seems that the solar angle has now become the new dogma.

Agreed. Other things could be responsible. I only said the lack of warming for over 10 years now SUGGESTS that solar effects are at least as large as CO2 effects. It doesn’t PROVE anything.

In particular, decadal scale temperature variations seem to be dominated by ocean oscillations, which are not well understood. But the data sets for a solar-climate link are long enough to overcome this difficulty. The presence of cosmogenic isotopes allows enables lots of studies that span several millennia, which is plenty of data for average tendencies to emerge, and study after study is finding strong solar effects on climate.

Internal variability certainly could feed on itself, allowing for internally generated oscillations. As you note, there are plausible such mechanisms in the Atlantic, and Bob Tisdale theorizes the same about Pacific oscillations. I don’t dismiss those possibilities at all, but they don’t in any way undercut the extensive evidence for a solar driver of climate. They would add noise to the relationship, and even make it possible for ocean heat content to rise after the sun has gone quiet in a world where solar activity does drive climate and CO2 does not.

If ocean heat content does go up, that is one of the possibilities to look at, but I would still have to start giving some credibility to the CO2 theory. With the sun going into a quiescent phase, nature is performing the perfect experiment. We can’t ignore the results.

The first thing, the Vostok and Greenland ice cores appear to have little relation to each other. Vostok is right near the south pole, thus, it is not a big surprise, since Vostok is pretty much as far away from anything else as you can get. My conclusion from this is that whatever is causing periods of cooling and warming, some areas will be different than others, and Vostok will be very different. Second conclusion, if you were to “average out” these two to get some kind of “global average temperature”, the Greenland temperatures would smooth out and you would not see much. Do we conclude from this that there was no MWP and no LIA? No, because this http://junkscience.com/2012/03/22/medieval-warm-period-little-ice-age-confirmed-in-antarctica/ taken offshore of Antarctica, shows evidence for both. A second conclusion is that if you carefully choose which data to include, basically cherry picking, you can get rid of little problems like LIA’s, or throw off the timing so as to make sure it does not track with anything you don’t want it to, like solar activity or CO2 or volcanoes or anything else. I therefore have to wonder where all the data came from from the 2000 yr graphs I was shown. Was there averaging out, was there cherry picking by the original graph makers, was there cherry picking when choosing which graph of temperature to compare with which graph of solar activity? Considering that many people seem to be on one side or another, for or against CO2 or cosmic rays or whatever, I have to wonder this.

Second, having seen that the MWP and LIA existed worldwide and must be taken into account and explained somehow, I look at the 10,000 yr Greenland graph above and see some definite things. First and very obvious, the LIA was at least twice as long as earlier cool periods (or more), if it was caused by cycles that tend toward coolness starting all at the same time (rather than tending to cancel each other out), wouldn’t it have only lasted as long as earlier cool periods? I mean, just how long can all the cycles ALL be cool? Second, comparing it to the solar activity, I notice that during that time frame, there was an unusual LENGTH of Grand Minimum type activity. That is one of unusual length, as well as several others of shorter length, all in that same time period, with the total length of time of very low solar activity being greater than at other times. If we assume that this quote is true It is the oceans that are principal regulators of the global temperatures on the century long time scale, well, then perhaps if solar activity levels are going to have a noticeable effect, they need to last long enough to overcome the momentum of long time scale ocean effects. Thus I suggest that when the sun has low activity, it needs to keep that up for a long period of time to have a noticeable effect on global temperature. It thus appears that the solar activity did have an affect in the LIA through sheer dogged persistence. I would guess that whether or not solar activity was the main cause of the LIA, at the very least, it appears that it was a likely cause of the sheer length of the cold in that period. Otherwise, I would have expected the length of the cold to be about the same as the earlier, shorter periods (in some cases much shorter and/or milder).

Also, since it is a reality that much of the warming of this planet is the sun warming that oceans which then warm the air, if the sun does something different, the effect will depend on which patch of ocean it shines on and what that patch is already doing. Some areas will have currents, some areas will have upwelling of deep water and the stored heat or cold there, some currents will be affected by icecaps and the like, and how fast they melt. Some things will tend to counteract each other, for instance, if cosmic rays do make for more clouds in the real world, more clouds make more shade, which can result in cooler water, which means less evaporation and less clouds, also less production of DMS which tend to aid cloud formation, thus the cosmic rays have to fight against these other forces which means that whoever is strongest will win and make either more or less clouds. And all of that may depend on time of day, latitude, currents (if any), type and amount of seal life, etc. Thus I suspect that these other forces will tend to obscure any cosmic ray (or other solar created) effects, meaning that in some areas it may have a strong effect, in others almost none, and in some effects we may not be able to see in proxies, such as no change in temperature yet fairly noticeable climate changes in some areas, such as larger temperature swings creating frosts, changes in rainfall amount or timing, and other things that could create significant effects agriculturally.

Perhaps we should not be asking, does solar activity change worldwide average temperatures, but, does solar activity (major changes in) change local climate in specific places (possibly large areas, like land in the northern hemisphere, say). Example from above, changes in Greenland (at the place they took the ice cores) significant, changes at Vostok Station near the south pole, not noticeable. We would also like to know the answer to that for specific places and at specific times in the ocean, since that is where the majority of warming or cooling will happen. Perhaps we should not let the warmists dictate the fictional idea “global average temperature”, and concentrate on the real world actual temperatures and climates, which are always different and changing. Then, we could ask, for instance, what would the effect of a longish period of low solar activity on, say, the specific place in Greenland they took these 10,000 yr ice cores from be, with it’s specific regime of ocean currents, latitude, jet streams, and everything else that effects it there. Then, we would have a better chance of seeing what effect solar activity has, and we would also be a lot better at making and matching graphs of solar activity versus temperature, being able to see, for instance, of changes in solar activity have an effect over here as compared to over there. We might thus be able to actually see something (or not see something), which we are less likely to do if we average everything out and thus have to contend with short, medium, and long scale cycles already present canceling out and muddying the data.

And a radical idea, rather than one person saying that, say, cosmic rays are the cause of, say, the LIA, or are not the cause, and insisting that no other causes be allowed to compete, could we at least admit the possibility that there may be more than one thing going on? What with ocean currents, volcanoes, CO2, ENSO, ozone, UV rays, polar vortexes, jet streams, and various other cycles of various lengths going on, and helped or apposed by forcings, feedbacks, and thermostat effects, I think that should be pretty much a given. With all that going on, if we don’t see an exact match between solar activity and climate, we should not be surprised. Even if the solar activity has a major affect, it has a lot of competition at any given moment for top dog climate wise.

Legatus says:
May 3, 2012 at 8:10 pmWell, I looked over the several 2000 yr or so records shown here.
First, I was really interested in a longer time scale, say 10,000 years. Examples, ,,,
You make good points. And, indeed, the records are noisy and often contradictory, so it is hard to figure out what is going on. If we had a reliable mechanism we could calculate what the solar effect should be and then perhaps untangle the web, but we don’t. In addition, people are polarized and will believe anything solar if it helps defeat CO2 [or vice versa]. That leads to labels like ‘obvious’ on one side and ‘ludicrous’ on the other, none of which are helpful.

However I think there is enough data now available to say that solar variations other than raw TSI are affecting the climate system but being heavily modulated by oceanic internal system variability.

We can see a mix of interacting top down solar and bottom up oceanic influences sometimes supplementing and sometimes offsetting each other.

There is a myriad of other factors but by and large at any given time they more or less cancel out and leave sun and oceans supreme over timescales of centuries or more.

As for the solar effect it appears to operate via upper atmospheric interaction with solar particles and wavelenghts to alter the vertical temperature profile inducing air circulation changes that affect total global cloudiness and albedo with the effects spreading out from the poles as the polar vortices expand and contrac approximatelt in time with solar changes.

The link with solar activity is hard to discern over periods of less than several decades due to internal system variability from other causes (especially the oceans) and from underlying chaotic behaviour on short timescales but over a century or more the solar influence becomes increasingly more apparent and at one millennium or longer it looks pretty convincing.

In fact, now that I think I know what we should be looking for, even shorter term solar variations do appear to have a link to the size and intensity of the polar vortices as witness the recent very low solar minimum coinciding with a record negative AO and much more meridional / equatorwardl jet streams with more global cloud cover.

During the late 20th century warming period we saw a much more positive AO with less global cloudiness and more zonal / poleward jetstreams.

Some questions:
For 24 times now, we have seen solar minimums and maximums every 11 years or so. During the minimum, there are less or no sunspots. During that time, does the solar wind slow down significantly? I am asking that because the main possible reason for cosmic ray effects seems to depend on the intensity of the solar wind. If solar wind continues pretty much as normal during a standard solar cycle minimum, that means that solar wind intensity may not be able to be estimated on the short scale at least from such proxies as we may have (sunspot count). Or do the proxies (the longe scale ones especially) measure cosmic rays more directly? Also, how long would it take of solar wind slowness for there to be any effect on cosmic rays, days, years, decades? If it takes a very long time, that would explain why it is hard to spot cosmic ray driven changes in the climate, one could only expect to see them with a long enough Solar Minimum (caracterized by less active solar cycle maximums).

We need a new name for named solar minimums as different than the standard solar minimums that happen every 11 years, I try to Capitalize the named minimums to differentiate then, but I don’t think even that is enough. Is there another name for things like say the Maunder Minimum other than Solar Minimum?

And about UV effects on polar climate, does UV go down every 11 years during solar cycle minimum? If it does, do the poles see changes every 11 years? If they do, do we see changes in weather near the poles? If it does not, and the next cycles is of very low activity, we should have a good chance to ovserve if there are climate effects near the poles from changes in UV. If there are, and we are looking at “global average temeprature” for an indication of a cold period or not, we may see little in that even though some people in the northern hemesphere are freezing (relatively speaking). Also, if any climate effects are partially or mostly from UV, I would expect that global average temperature changes could take a very long time if the main effect of UV is near the poles, since most of the warming is at lower lattitudes. People in Holland may be skating on canals while people in Bali see no change at all. This of course assumes that UV has any noticable effect, we should have a very good chance to obsorve this if our CO2 obsessed masters will allow us to look at anything except CO2.

If changes in solar activity (named minimums) do effect climate, but the mechanism has little or nothing to do with cosmic rays, and a lot or all of it has to do with UV, and IF the main effect of UV is near the poles, we should be able to tell from proxies that, during major named minimums, it gets a lot colder fairly fast near the poles, while things like “global average temperature” and temparature at much lower lattitudes are much slower to change. Thus, if UV has a major effect, we may be able to tell this by seeing a difference in past temperatures where it gets colder fast at way inland near polar areas (to keep it away from ocean current effects flowing up from tropical areas) as compared to tropical areas where any drop in temparatures is delayed if at all. Do we have any reliable temparature proxies from central Siberia or Canada that go back to at least the LIA, preferably to at least the MWP?

lastly, looking at this https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/easterbrook_fig5.jpg , I see one long period of cooling (at that one spot in Greenland), two shorter ones, and one much shorter one, as we go back in time. Are there proxies of solar activity and/or cosmic rays and/or UV that show any change in solar activity during those times? What about the major heat spikes? If proxies exist and show no major solar change, this can mean that at the very least, there is something that can cause shorter periods of coldness that is not solar related. it may still be that if we once again have a fairly long period of solar low activity (the LIA had the very long Maunder plus several other lesser Minimums) that we could see coldness, but if those past episodes of coldness where not associated with solar activities, the it may have to be long for major worldwide coldness at least.

Legatus says:
May 4, 2012 at 7:22 amDuring the minimum, there are less or no sunspots. During that time, does the solar wind slow down significantly?
Here is the variation of several solar wind quantities over a solar cycle: http://www.leif.org/research/Climatological%20Solar%20Wind.png [based on data for cycles 13 thru 23]

Or do the proxies (the longe scale ones especially) measure cosmic rays more directly?
We observe radioactive nuclii produced by cosmic rays and transported and deposited by atmospheric processes [i.e. climate itself]. Direct, well-calibrated measurements of cosmic rays goes back to ~1950.

Also, how long would it take of solar wind slowness for there to be any effect on cosmic rays, days, years, decades?
About one year, which is the time it takes the solar wind to move to the edge of the heliosphere. Rare burst of solar wind can produce short-lived [a few days] changes in the cosmic ray flux.

Is there another name for things like say the Maunder Minimum other than Solar Minimum?
Usually called ‘Grand Solar Minima’

And about UV effects on polar climate, does UV go down every 11 years during solar cycle minimum?
UV follows the sunspot number very closely.

If it does, do the poles see changes every 11 years?
Not that everyone can agree upon.

Do we have any reliable temparature proxies from central Siberia or Canada that go back to at least the LIA, preferably to at least the MWP?
No

First, I look at this again (note, true for Greenland, not necessarily true for everywhere), I see cold periods at the following times:
6385 BC (short but cold)
about 2771 BC (less cold, but medium length)
about 1304 AD (cold, medium long)
and the LIA from about 655 AD to 150 AD (cold, very long compared to the others)

Now, my question is, for those first three cold periods, can we say whether or not they coincided with a Grand Solar Minima? If they did not, we have something, we can say that cold periods, at least short ones, are possible without a Grand Solar Minima to drive it. That would tell us that something else is at work. We may not know yet what it is, but if we can rule out Grand Solar Minima during those times, we will at least know that it exists.

Also, was there ever another time when there were so many Minima bunched up together, including one that was long and deep, as was true for the LIA, yet the temperature did not respond? If we can know of such a time, know the length and depth of the Minima and also the temperature, if the temperature stayed up, we could say that either grand Solar Minima have little or no effect on temperature, or that whatever is changing temperature in question one is stronger than Grand Solar Minima and was working against it that time.

It would also be nice to know if the Minoan warm period and the other two warm period of sequel strength before it (unnamed) coincided with Grand Solar Maxima.

If we cannot conclusively show that the sun did it, we may be able to show that there are times when the sun did not do it, which will then tell us that we should look for something else that did. This may not leave the sun entirely free of, uh, guilt for making the LIA, however, it can show that the sun may be less involved than we believe. There is still the Maunder and several other Grand Solar Minima (the others being not so grand) all happening during this time frame (rather like finding someone at the scene of the crime who we do not know yet was involved, but they were there and could be), so they may well have contributed (especially to the length), but they may have had help.

One possibility is that there are various cycles of hot and cold going on. When a bunch of them all happen to cycle cold at the same time, there will be a shortish period of cold (as in 6385 BC). As time has gone on, they tend more toward cold and less toward heat, the hot periods are less hot and long, and the cold periods have gotten progressively longer. This may be due to a slow decline in inslotion (which we know about), and/or it could be because of increasing periods of Grand Minimas, or both. It may be that, with the slowly decreasing insolation, cold periods will tend longer. However, in the LIA, it may be that it would have been only a little longer, but when it was scheduled to get warm again, along came one or more Grand Solar Minima and drove things back toward cold again.

One way to look at it is like a crime. Some people are blaming the sun for the entirety of the LIA. If we can show that the sun was present at past crimes (which of course it was) but did not do it then, that leaves open the possibility that it did not do it in the LIA as well, or that it was only an accessory to the crime and will only serve 10 years instead of 25 to life.

One possibility is that there are cycles of hot and cold, and that they can line up to all be cold at the same time and make shortish periods of cooling as we see in the past. The sun may also have periods of Grand Minima which also tend toward cold, but in the past cycles that were tending toward hot may have overridden it (or just muddied the scientific waters). Think of it as the sun being just one of many crooks, and in the past, the other crooks were stronger so the sun was not able to muscle in on their territory. After a while though, these other criminals got slowly weaker, and then the sun got stronger, in terms of being able to throw a whole bunch of Grand Solar Minima at the same time. In terms of crime, at this time, the sun became a Crime Boss, and hired other crooks to go out and do its dirty work for it ( made it so there was less hot cycles and more cold cycles by bludgeoning them down with repeated and deep/long Minima). This way, the sun can say “I didn’t do it”, and be sorta correct, the sun may not have done it, it hired other crooks to do it. That may be why it is so hard to tell if the sun did it.

Meanwhile, the UV evidence is uncertain (probably hired all those other crooks to muddy the waters with cycles and stuff so we can’t see what happened), and the Interplanetary Magnetic Field has stayed so steady and regular for 10 cycles that if it has a hand in cooling we certainly can’t tell it there. The good news, detective Lief has received a hot tip about a crime about to go down, and is lurking in the bushes to catch em in the act (the sun may actually do something new for a change). The only problem, there may be so many of them running around it may be hard to tell who did what and how much. Some of them may be Doing The Dirty Deed, some may simply be accessories (drivers, lookouts) and some may be hired to stand around just to confuse the cops (“stand here and look guilty”).

Of course, we now have to name this new detective series:
The Adventure of the Speckled Sun
Solar Blaze
The Yellow Face (the sun did it in those three)
The Five Orange Suns (volcanoes)
The Crooked Current (the ocean did it)
The Geek Interpreter (CO2 did it, but you can only tell from a model)

BTW, the reason I was interested in say central Siberia for a proxy is to try and find someplace without the ocean interfering. That way, we might be able to spot UV/polar effects. However, I suspect that no such place exists on this planet. That ocean really makes it hard to tell where the cooling or warming is coming from. Doesn’t it know that we are trying to do serious scientific work here?!

Legatus says:
May 4, 2012 at 8:08 pm
One possibility is that there are various cycles of hot and cold going on.
Some cold periods do coincide with Grand Minima, and some do not. The first order of business before speculation takes flight is to produce reliable historical records. We do not yet have such, but it is being worked on [hard] and the situation is bound to improve.

The big confounding factor is indeed the oceans and of course other influences could gang up from time to time to either supplement or offset the net interaction from sun and oceans.

Your description of the detective type approach that is necessary is spot on and I agree with Leif that currently we don’t have enough of the right historical data to disentangle it all.

In the meantime Leif is pretty sure that the sun is not implicated whereas I am pretty sure that it is.

Modern sensors and intense ongoing scrutiny are likely to firm the issue up one way or the other over coming years. Current solar behaviour is so different from that of the late 20th century that the evidence one way or the other should not be long coming if the sun doesn’t revert to that earlier behaviour in the near future.

Many features of the climate system changed around 2000 in time with the decline in solar activity and I find it very hard to believe that so many changes occurred all at the same time for the sun not to be a factor:

The stratosphere stopped cooling.
Cloudcover and albedo began to increase again.
The jets became more meridional / equatorward
ENSO turned more towards La Nina
Tropospheric temperatures stopped rising.
Ocean heat content stopped rising.
AO became record negative around the time of lowest solar activity for 100 years.
Arctic ice continued to drop until 2007 due to oceanic lags but may now be recovering.
The cold pools around the north pole in winter have been intensifying.

Stephen Wilde says:
May 5, 2012 at 12:37 amIn the meantime Leif is pretty sure that the sun is not implicated whereas I am pretty sure that it is.
Here is the difference: I’m not ‘pretty sure’. It is only that the evidence is too weak to be compelling or even suggestive. You are ‘pretty sure’ from the outset, no matter what the evidence is.

Stephen Wilde says:
May 5, 2012 at 8:27 am“You are ‘pretty sure’ from the outset, no matter what the evidence is.”
An unnecessary and inaccurate cheap shot which is not worthy of you.
Let me make the shot cheaper yet:
You are pretty sure a priori [‘what else can it be’, ‘it is obvious’, etc] and are looking for evidence to support that view.
I’m not sure, and looking at the weak evidence does not help to make me more sure.
Or: your null-hypothesis is that the sun must be important somehow.
My null-hypothesis is that from what I know about this, the sun is but a bit-player.
I’m willing to have my null-hypothesis be proven wrong by strong evidence [haven’t seen any yet].
Are you willing to have yours be proven wrong [and by what specific evidence]?

“Are you willing to have yours be proven wrong [and by what specific evidence]?”

Yes indeed.

And on more than one previous occasion I have listed for you a number of real world events that would cause me problems if they were to happen.

Thus your shot is not only cheap but disingenuous.

A reminder (not exhaustive):

Stratospheric cooling resumes whilst the sun remains quiet.
Global cloudiness begins to decrease again whilst the sun remains quiet.
The jets become as zonal as they were in the late 20th century whilst the sun remains quiet.
We see a record positive AO whilst the sun remains quiet.

Can’t say fairer than that.

Would your null hypothesis be shown likely to be wrong if those things fail to happen ?
If not, why not ?

Stephen Wilde says:
May 5, 2012 at 9:05 amStratospheric cooling resumes whilst the sun remains quiet.
Global cloudiness begins to decrease again whilst the sun remains quiet.
The jets become as zonal as they were in the late 20th century whilst the sun remains quiet.
We see a record positive AO whilst the sun remains quiet.
Can’t say fairer than that.
Yes, you could, but of course you can’t. What is missing is numbers. How large a decrease against how quiet a sun, and how long do we wait before calling the shot, etc.

Would your null hypothesis be shown likely to be wrong if those things fail to happen ?
If not, why not ?
Without quantification we can’t make any judgments. Let me give you an example:
Many years ago [1977] I argued that there was a definite physical cause of geomagnetic activity, namely the solar wind [others argued the same] and that the physics was well enough understood that one could calculate geomagnetic activity accurately from observed parameters of the solar wind in real time and gave a formula for that. See page 7 of http://www.leif.org/research/Physics-based%20Long-term%20Geomagnetic%20Indices.pdf
On page 8 [left panel] I showed how well the formula derived from the physics [with, admittedly, an empirical calibration] represented the actual observed activity. That is compelling evidence. But, one could object that the formula is but a fit to existing data and that it may just be a lucky guess that would only work with hind casting and therefore does not strictly prove causality. The right panel shows [in color] how well the formula works with data taken 30 years later. It still works, and THAT shows that we understand this and that there is physical causality. What is compelling here is the numerical and quantitative match. Once we have something like that for the Sun-Weather-Climate connection exceeding the paltry 0.1K that I expect, my null-hypothesis will fail [and I’ll happily accept the connection, making my solar research much more valuable and vastly increasing my chances of funding].

Leif Svalgaard says:
May 5, 2012 at 9:26 amMany years ago [1977] I argued that there was a definite physical cause of geomagnetic activity, namely the solar wind [others argued the same] and that the physics was well enough understood that one could calculate geomagnetic activity accurately from observed parameters of the solar wind in real time and gave a formula for that.
It is only since then that we are secure in our knowledge of the sun and its influence on geomagnetic activity. For the first 150 years of this journey scientists were in much the same situation as they are in today with sun-weather-climate: weak evidence, conflicting claims, general confusion, many silly and physically untenable hypotheses [planets, meteor streams, etc] abounded, etc. It is sobering to compare the historical developments of these two subjects. Without doubt in my mind, the problem will be resolved one way or the other in future, but we are not there yet.

Stephen Wilde says:
May 5, 2012 at 11:46 pm“Once we have something like that for the Sun-Weather-Climate connection exceeding the paltry 0.1K that I expect, my null-hypothesis will fail ”
Shouldn’t be long then :)
If history is any guide, I would say a hundred years….

In the meantime changes in the direction of trends is all we have in the absence of more precise quantification.
You don’t even have numbers for the trends.
To falsify a hypothesis, you first figure out how much [in numbers] to expect from the hypothesis, then you measure [in numbers] how much you actually got, then compare the two numbers. No numbers, no falsification.

Doh! I completely misused the “null hypothesis” term. What I call Miller’s two null hypotheses are just his two hypotheses, and what I call his “alternate hypotheses” are just the alternatives to his hypotheses. If I want to use the “null hypothesis” terminology, then the “alternative hypothesis” would refer to Miller’s own hypothesis, not to the alternatives to his hypothesis.

Miller’s own hypothesis is that volcanism caused the LIA. The null hypothesis to this “alternate hypothesis” is that volcanism did NOT cause the Little Ice Age. It is a statistical test to see if the observed correlation between volcanism and the LIA could be random, with the actual causes of the LIA lying elsewhere. Of course this null hypothesis is no-where near rejected. Miller is offering a possible explanation for a single episode (an anecdote). He’s not showing a whole string of cases where volcanism is correlated with an out-sized episode of global cooling, making mere coincidence unlikely.

Pretty silly of me to use the “null hypothesis” terminology without brushing up on its meaning. Not sure how I managed to mis-remember it. Maybe because the null hypothesis IS just another way of stating the researcher’s own hypothesis (in negative form). If I had just left out the word “null” then my ordinary-language uses of hypothesis and alternate hypothesis would have been sound, and if I still wanted to venture into a mention of the null-hypothesis, there actually WAS something interesting to say about it in this case: since Miller’s paper cannot begin to refute its null hypothesis, on what grounds does it merit publication?

Screwing around with the null hypothesis seems to be the new normal. Demand others prove you wrong, without allowing access to the data. Nice work if you can get it.

BTW, you do Jerry Pournelle a disservice by referring to him just as an SF writer, though that is where he ended up. Here’s some of his priors:

Jerry served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War as an artillery officer. After Korea, he earned advanced degrees in psychology, statistics, engineering, and political science, including two PhDs. He acquired political experience by serving as Executive Assistant to the Mayor and Director of Research for the City of Los Angeles, campaign manager for Congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr. (Republican), and campaign manager for the third (successful) campaign for Mayor Samuel William Yorty (Democrat).

Jerry was an intellectual protege of Russell Kirk (Kenneth C. Cole, his mentor at the University of Washington, was cofounder with Kirk of Modern Age) and Stefan T. Possony with whom he wrote numerous publications including The Strategy of Technology which was required reading in the U.S. service academies during the latter half of the Cold War. His work in the aerospace industry included editing Project 75, a 1964 study of 1975 defense requirements. He worked in operations research at Boeing, The Aerospace Corporation, and North American Rockwell Space Division, and was founding President of the Pepperdine Research Institute.

For a taste of his current output, check out jerrypournelle.com . I mostly stay away from it recently because it’s so fascinating and my sleep time is already below survival level.